Fiction

Chapter 27: What if?

He and the defense attorney were alone. They were – where? Nowhere. Not only no courtroom, no  hospital room, no room at all, nor any outdoors scene. They might as well have been standing in a pea-souper such as he had seen in London.

“So, now what? We stand around waiting?”

“Not exactly. But we are finished pretending to judge you. The whole charade was to help you to see your life more clearly.”

“And you aren’t my defense attorney any more, I take it.”

“Never was. You can call me Nick Adams.”

“Nick Adams, right.” He smiled. “All right, Nick. So, your current function is –?”

“You can think of me as a friend.”

“Okay.”

The man wanted him to ask; he waited him out. Nice to have the shoe on the other foot for once.

“You don’t want to know what to expect next?”

“What I expect is that you will get around to telling me, sooner or later.”

“Nick seemed to repress a small internal smile. “I must say, I like your attitude. All right. We just took a fast look at the life you lived, some of the highlights. The process isn’t over until you look at the life you didn’t live. The negative space in the picture, you might say.”

“Sure, `The path not taken.’ Thank you Robert Frost. How, exactly?”

“Instead of trying to explain it to you, let’s just do it. Think of any moment of your life that you’d like to relive. Imagine it vividly, the way you did in 3D life. Then, as things unfold, change them. If you turned left, turn right. Or go straight on, or stop, whatever you want. Change things; see what happens.”

“Okay.” He paused. “Start at birth, I suppose? Or, work backwards?”

“Start where you want to start. Beginning, end, anywhere in the middle, it doesn’t matter. Everything connects.”

“No particular guidelines?”

“You might begin with whatever wells up unbidden.”

“Huh. Okay.” He closed his non-3D eyes, and he instantly knew. When he reopened them, there he was, wounded, helpless, in pain, being carried on a stretcher in the middle of the night. He wasn’t looking at the scene; he was immersed in it. He had forgotten the noise of the shells, the concussions. He was being carried to the first-aid station, and a shell hit close enough to drop his stretcher-bearers, and him, to the ground. The men arranged him back on the stretcher and picked him up, apologizing in Italian and with their eyes.

He was both in the scene and observing it, an odd bifurcation. “July 8, 1918,” he said.

Nick was nowhere to be seen, but he heard him say, “Feel free to go back before the shell hit. Or have it miss you.”

“I can do that?”

“Of course you can. That’s the point of `what if’ scenarios. How does your life change if you never get wounded? Ask to see some consequences.”

“We’re going to be here quite a while, then!”

“No need for detail, just get the highlights.”

“Fine.”

.2.

He returned to wherever it was.

“So what happened?”

“What I expect you know happened. My life began to play out, a rapid sequence of things, like riffling a deck of cards. Is this supposed to be what would have happened, or just what might have happened?”

“We aren’t dealing in certainties, here, Mr. Hemingway. It isn’t like there was only one possible path. At any moment of your life, the rest of your life is more decisions, and every decision means another choice, opening up new paths and closing others. The more decision points you pass, the more indefinite is the path beyond. So what changed when you didn’t get wounded?”

“Everything changed! It wasn’t even my life anymore. I didn’t spend six months in the hospital listening to wounded veterans. Never met Chink. Never met Agnes. Didn’t have a first love in Italy. I didn’t go home on the Giuseppe Verdi, didn’t get interviewed by the New York paper or by Oak Leaves, never talked to any civic groups, Therefore, I never met Mrs. Connable, and never spent the winter in Toronto hanging around the Toronto Weekly Star offices, and so I never got to become one of their free-lance feature writers. Since I was never a wounded war veteran, I didn’t have a year’s worth of insurance payments to tide me over while I tried to learn to write, so in some versions I gave in and went to college, and in others I got my job back at the Kansas City Star, or I found some kind of job in the Oak Park area – that is, Chicago.”

“Did you meet Hadley?”

“That seems to depend. If I went to college or went back to Kansas City, no. If I stayed in Chicago until Hash came up to visit Katy, maybe yes, depending on what I was doing. But even when I did meet her, I wasn’t the same person, and often enough we didn’t really click. Without July 8th, I wasn’t the same person. I came home safe and sound and boring and bored.”

“On the other hand, without it you didn’t spend years being afraid of the dark, or pulling scrap metal out of your leg.”

“True. Still, without it, I don’t see how I would ever have gotten to Paris.“

“Ready to try again? Leave July 8 as it was, and change something else.”

“Okay. That was almost fun. A hell of a lot better than listening to people attack me.”

“Is that your impression of what they were doing?”

“Let’s do some more.”

“A suggestion? You may want to go about your examination systematically. Perhaps begin at the beginning.”

“All right.” And off he went again, this time all the way back to his childhood.

.3.

“And what did you find?”

“I guess I was always going to be a writer. I wrote for the school paper, I was editor of the literary magazine. Maybe I could have decided to go off to college. It wouldn’t have been so bad. It would have been fun, because I would have made it fun. I would have put together a mob there, same as I did everywhere. By the time I was old enough to enlist, I would have had a year of college, and that would have made a difference, later. Even if I had gone into the ambulances, like plenty of other college guys, I would have had a better idea about college, what it had to offer.”

“You wouldn’t have been afraid of college men.”

He winced. “Since you put it that way, okay. But I would have been just as harsh on their shortcomings. It’s just, I would have seen them more clearly.”

“And you wouldn’t have come across the Kansas City Star’s style sheet.”

“That’s true. But even in what I wrote in high school, you can see my style emerging. You can’t tell, really, what would have happened.”

“Did you look to see what would have happened if you had stayed in school and missed the war entirely?”

A decisive shake of the head. “That was never going to happen.”

“Your defective eyesight guaranteed that the Army would never have taken you.”

“I would have found a way, one way or the other. I might have wound up in a different unit, and maybe wound up in France instead of Italy. All kinds of things might have been different, but I wouldn’t have stayed home.”

“All right, I think you have the idea. Look at your life as you didn’t live it.  If you find things you want to talk about, we can do that – I’ll be here – or you can just keep exploring. It’s up to you.”

“And how long do we go about it?”

“Until you get tired of doing it.”

“Could go on forever.”

“It isn’t like we’re on the clock here. It’s really up to you. Just go until you’re finished.”

“Okay, I get it. I suppose I’ll see you whenever.” He turned his attention inward, waiting for a question to surface. It didn’t take long.

“What if you hadn’t become friends with Bill Smith?”

“Well,” he thought, What if?”

.4.

In the short term, nothing much changed. He was still spending his summers by the lake, still working the farm at his father’s long-distance direction, still enjoying the woods and the water and the town and the freedom from the schoolyear’s discipline. And there were other boys to pal around with: He always knew how to draw people to him, and he always liked having a mob to do things with. But – he realized – a little way down the road, without Bill, no Katy! Without Katy and Bill, no sharing an apartment with their brother Y.K. Without Y.K., no introduction to Sherwood Anderson, no meeting others of the Chicago Renaissance like Carl Sandberg, plus he probably would have gone to Italy as he planned, instead of Paris. And if he hadn’t been in Paris, could he have met Dos? Even if he had gotten to Paris, how could he have hoped to meet Pound, and yes, Gertrude, without Anderson’s letters of introduction?

In fact, without Bill, and therefore Katy, how would he have met Katy’s best friend Hadley Richardson? And if he hadn’t fallen in love with Hadley, would he ever have gotten to Europe at all?

He shook his head. It was like learning that he had spent all his life walking on the thinnest of ice, never realizing that it was only his forward movement that stopped it from cracking and breaking under his weight. “Hairbreadth Harry,” he said.

“You bet.” The thought came to him. “It’s a good thing we were good skaters.”

“We?”

“You think you just happened to be in the right place at the right time, over and over again?”

“Well, when you put it that way, maybe not.”

“You bet, maybe not. And the more you look, the more you’ll see. You thought, what if you’d never met Hadley, but what if you had met her, and on the same night you did meet her, but the two of you hadn’t clicked?”

.5.

There they were in Y.K.’s apartment, and Katy was introducing her friend from St. Louis, but the evening didn’t work. Katy’s Chicago crowd didn’t warm to her friend and sweep her into their circle. Hadley, on her part, didn’t open up and show her sense of fun. She had played the piano, but formally, classically, not swinging into the wild jazz tunes that made them realize that they were young and alive. Even the liquor didn’t help; everyone remained polite, restrained. He had stood there admiring her long red hair, but wishing it wasn’t all so awkward. He got out as soon as he decently could, and kept his distance from her for the rest of her visit.

“But it never could have happened that way,” he said. “We were meant for each other. We hadn’t been talking for ten minutes before we were both feeling it.”

A half-heard voice: (“And if that first ten minutes hadn’t happened? If she had had a cold, or you had? If she had been too shy to let her real self show, or you were too boisterous and self-aggrandizing? Plenty of ships pass in the night. What if you had been two more such ships?”)

If he had still been in a body, he might have felt a shiver.

“If you can’t admit it here and now, when and where will you ever be able to do so?”

“Who says there’s anything to admit?”

“You know there is. If you don’t admit it, if you can’t, then God help you.”

“All right! I admit it! I would have been lost.”

“What would you have been missing?”

“Hadley’s warmth! Someone to love, someone to love me.”

“Someone to hold you in the darkness.”

Reluctantly: “That too.”

“At age 21, without Hadley, what were you, Mr. Hemingway?”

It was humiliating to admit it, even now.

“Oh come on! Who are you posing for?”

A sigh, or its non-3D equivalent. “Nobody, I guess. Myself, maybe.”

“Yes, and what’s the pose for, Mr. Afraid Of Nothing?”

He knew. “I needed her. I needed somebody, and thank God it was her.” Blurting it out: “I couldn’t be alone.”

Silence. After a moment he felt constrained to break it. “Well? Nothing to say? No snide comments?”

“I was letting you sit with the realization.”

“Like I didn’t know it!”

“Yes, but now you have admitted it. It makes a world of difference to admit something. It frees you. Why do you suppose that you were repressing that particular realization, Mr. Hemingway?”

“I don’t know that I did. Didn’t I say that a man alone hasn’t got a fucking chance?”

“Yes, you did. Is this what you meant by it?”

Reluctantly again: “No.”

“We know you think we’re beating you on the head with all this, and we know you think we enjoy it, but we aren’t, and we don’t.”

“Meaning we can move on?”

“Meaning exactly that. Suppose you hadn’t had those introductions Sherwood Anderson gave you.”

“My God,” he said. “Is it possible I could have lived in Paris and never met Sylvia?”

.6.

He wouldn’t have thought so, but the longer he looked, the more unsure he became. Without Anderson to steer him there, would he have even known that Shakespeare and Co. existed? Sylvia wasn’t famous in 1921. She wasn’t yet the den mother for the lost generation. Sylvia had introduced him to Joyce, and had helped him meet Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.

Anderson himself had found her shop essentially by accident, and had introduced himself to her only because she had placed his book in the window. Suppose he hadn’t gone down that street. Suppose she hadn’t placed Winesburg, Ohio in the window?  Suppose Anderson hadn’t come home to tell young Hemingway he had to go to Paris, and had to see the following people?

“No. I would have found her. As soon as Hash and I got ourselves set up, we would have been prowling the streets to see what we could see. We would have found her, sooner or later.” But the worm of doubt persisted. For one thing, who had helped the young Hemingways to find a place to live but Lewis Galantiere? And how did Galantiere know of them except via Anderson?

“Dammit!” But there was no blinking the fact: It was Anderson’s letters that had opened the way, time after time, putting him into touch not only with the established writers but the important ones, the coming ones. He couldn’t help counting them out like a litany: Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and then Ford Madox Ford and the sub-editorship of “the transatlantic review,” by which he became known before ever getting a word published between boards.

“Surprised?”

“It didn’t all come from Anderson’s letters,” he said defensively. “Plenty came out of my work with the Toronto Star.”

“Nobody would suggest otherwise,” Nick said mildly. “It was your inquiry, after all.”

“All right,” he growled. “And if you wanted the point made, it’s made. I owed Anderson, and I repaid him badly.”

“That may be your point, it was not mine. Mine was merely that you see how much hung on what look like improbable coincidences. You know the Smith family, so you come to stay at Y.K.’s. Y. K. works with Anderson and so he brings him home and the older established writer and the younger would-be writer hit it off. The older writer goes to Paris, happens to see his book in a bookstore window, and so happens to meet Sylvia Beach and happens to meet important literary people she knows. Then he happens to return to Chicago mere days before the younger writers is to sail for Italy, and persuades him to try Paris instead, and offers letters of introduction. That’s a good deal of concatenating ifs.”

“Yes it is. I was lucky.”

“Whatever luck is. Would you like a suggestion? Why don’t you see what your life would have been like if you had gone to Europe on your own, instead of working for the Star?”

“I don’t need to go anywhere to tell you that. It would have changed everything. I wouldn’t have come to the attention of Bob McAlmon, for one thing, which means Three Stories and Ten Poems almost certainly wouldn’t have been published, since it was his idea. But that wouldn’t have been the biggest change. When the Star started sending me to write features about the conferences, that’s when I met the foreign correspondents and became a member of that club. And without all that, I wouldn’t have learned cablese, which had an enormous effect on my writing, and wouldn’t have met Lincoln Steffens, for another, a good guy who taught me a lot. That all came from working for the Star.”

“Then where do you go from here?”

“Let me free-associate, see what surfaces.” Within seconds: “Gertrude and Spain. Never thought of that. She’s the one who got me interested in bullfights. That’s probably why I went to Spain in 1923 with McAlmon and Bill Bird.”

“But suppose you hadn’t liked bullfighting? Plenty of Americans didn’t.”

“Not like it?”

And he was off again.

.7.

Spain. Heat. Light. Dust. Color. Wine drunk from leather flasks. Tourists, yes, but tourists as drops in the sea of Spaniards. Medieval uniforms. Churches. Wooden carts older than could be counted.

And the tastes! Every day was a feast, and it didn’t matter how simple the fare was, or how quiet the meal.

And then, the corrida itself, another world, self-contained, outside of time, living in its pageantry and tradition. The horses and the picadors, a shock. The three acts, sensed but not yet understood. The moment of the killing, in all its intensity. Good killings and bad, good cape work and bad, brave   matadors and cowardly, skillful or merely tricky. Or was he overlaying all that he had learned onto that first eye-opening summer?

“And behind the scenes, Mr. Hemingway? What was happening?”

“Happening with me, you mean? I had come home. I belonged there; I don’t know how I came to be born in the United States. How could I not have liked bullfighting? That’s like imagining I wouldn’t like Spain. I was born head over heels in love with Spain, only it took me 20 years to get there. If I hadn’t gone in 1923, I would have gotten there sometime. If Gertrude hadn’t pointed me toward bullfighting, somebody else would have, or I would have found it on my own. It was like writing, it was part of me, and it would have come out one way or another.”

He stayed with the feeling, not putting it into words but living it, feeling it as precious to him. And Nick let him stay with it.

.8.

At length he said, “This procedure of yours has its uses. Why didn’t we start off this way, instead of going through all that trial business?”

Nick laughed. “Whose idea was it, after all? Or, not your idea, exactly, but it came out of what you are. You were primed to be judged and condemned. We played along until you opened up to other possibilities.”

“It sure didn’t feel like it!”

“How could it? As soon as you started to see through it, we were free to do other things.”

“But I didn’t see through it.”

“If you’ll go back and look, you’ll see that you were changing what you believed, behind your own back.”

“If you say so. What’s next?”

“Before you go too far, you might want to look at a different kind of ‘what if?’ What if Agnes had never sent you that Dear John letter?”

He shook his head decisively. “That was always going to happen, it’s just I didn’t realize it. She wasn’t in love with me, she was more in love with being in love. She was having fun in Europe. She probably wouldn’t have come home even if I had found a good job right away. And how much chance was there of that happening? To get started on a career takes time. It always does. There was never a path that she wasn’t going to write that Dear John. Let’s look at something else.”

“Then what about your return to Canada in 1923?”

If he had had a body, it would have grimaced.  “That goddamned Hindmarsh. But it wouldn’t have mattered if Hindmarsh had dropped dead. There is no way I was ever going to be able to write in Canada. Toronto was a damned dull town, and my youth was ticking away. Hash and I were going back to Paris, and the only question was how long would it take. But, you know, timing matters, sometimes. If we had waited too long, some doors might have closed, and then what? Getting back when we did was as important as getting there when we did in the first place.”

“You returned to Paris in 1924 with nothing to live on but Hadley’s inheritance. That was taking a chance. Suppose you hadn’t taken that chance?”

“Suppose we had played it safe, you mean? Don’t know. Don’t even want to know. I didn’t go into that life to play it safe.”

“What’s that? I didn’t quite hear you.”

“Yeah, very funny. So you’re saying my life did have a plan after all.”

“I didn’t say it, you did.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know I was going to say it.”

“That’s how you know it’s real. And after all, you can’t say the facts contradict the statement. When did you ever play it safe?”

“Never.”

“So there’s your pattern. Where did the pattern come from? Was it chance, or was it your character? And if it was your character, how different is that from saying it was your destiny, like burning your candle at both ends?”

“All right, I get the point.”

“If your life hadn’t gotten you to Paris the first time, you wouldn’t have gotten Three Stories and Ten Poems and in our time into print. And if you hadn’t returned in 1924, how would you have met F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had come across them and become a believer in your star?”

“And without Scott, maybe no Scribner’s, I get it. I should look at what if Scott hadn’t liked my books?”

“Or if you hadn’t met, or if you hadn’t hit it off, yes.”

.9.

He would never forget the meeting at the bar. Okay, erase it. He was elsewhere, or Scott never showed up. For whatever reason, their paths never crossed, they never met.

“Except,” he muttered to himself, “we would have. Scott would have kept on until we did. He could be a persistent bastard. But, let’s say we never met.”

It wasn’t like his days were empty. He was writing, he was working well. He and Hadley and Bumby were a family, and a pretty contented family, at that. And for intellectual company he had Sylvia and Gertrude and Dos and Ford and Ezra – no, Ezra had moved to Italy by then. But still, there were letters between them, back and forth. He had had so many friends, so many activities and interests. Without Scott’s disruptive presence, life flowed as it had been flowing.

Only –

He returned. “I don’t know how to think about it,” he said. “I had a good life, and I would have thought you can’t miss what you never had, but – maybe you can. It was like soup without just the right spice to bring it to life.”

“Are you saying Fitzgerald lit up the scene?”

“Until he got to be too much of a drunk, yeah.”

“And as you know, you had the same effect on others. So is looking at your life without Fitzgerald like looking at other people’s lives without Hemingway?”

“What’s your point?”

“It’s just a comment.”

“Sure.”

“What about the career consequences?”

“If I hadn’t met Scott? Maybe none. It’s interesting. Scott was pushing Max to contact me even before he and I met, and if we had never met, he still would have been pushing him. It wasn’t a matter of him liking me as a person, it was about him wanting Scribner’s to have all the coming authors.”

Delicately: “Did you look at what would have happened if you had submitted The Sun Also Rises and Fitzgerald hadn’t been there to tell you to cut the first few pages?”

“Actually, he didn’t tell me to cut them: He showed me problems with them. Cutting them entirely was my idea. And all right, it was important. Without that fix, sometimes the book flopped, sometimes it did so-so, but it didn’t make the splash it did in real life. So, I owe him that, and that was one time he made a difference editorially. But after that, he never quite got what I was doing, so his advice wasn’t worth much.”

There was a silence, in which the sentence reverberated.

“Okay, I got it, that was ungracious.”

“It was worse than ungracious. It shows that you still haven’t looked closely enough at your relation to him. You admit that he made an important difference, then you feel obliged to devalue it, to say in effect, ‘What have you done for me lately?’ Why is that?”

“I thought we were done with psychoanalysis. We’re doing ‘what ifs,’ right?”

“Then, what about celebrity, Mr. Hemingway? You no sooner signed up with Scribner’s than you found yourself partying with people you had only read about. Suppose you hadn’t made that sudden leap into prominence?”

The defense attorney was addressing the jury.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, obviously the facts of the defendant’s life are not in dispute. However, facts require interpretation, and that is what I will attempt to provide. After I conclude my remarks, the defendant will speak to you directly, and then it will be for you to decide, and for the judge to make his recommendation.

“The externals of his life are soon told. Born into an upper middle class family with Midwestern values, he inherited his mother’s artistic disposition and his father’s scientific and nature-oriented disposition. He inherited his mother’s imperious will and his father’s precarious mental stability, hence he entered life both strongly motivated and ultra-sensitive. Perhaps you will agree, an ideal background for one who was to be among the most successful and insightful writers of his time.

“In the short space of a dozen years, from age 18 to age 30, he went from being a cub reporter to being a world-recognized master of fiction. During this time he married Hadley Richardson, they moved to Paris, they had a son, and he worked at learning to write fiction. The same period saw him leave his wife and marry Pauline Pfeiffer.

“Between the wars, he authored five books and Pauline and he had two sons, then this marriage too broke up. He moved to Cuba, married Martha Gellhorn, and spent the war years hunting submarines and covering allied operations In Europe after D-Day. After the war, with Mary, wife number four, he worked for years on a vast project most of which he never brought to completion, although he did win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His last years were marked by physical and mental illness, and recently he took `the family exit,’ as he called it, killing himself, and finding himself here, wondering what comes next.”

He thought, That’s not a very long summary, for a life that was always so full. The defense attorney overheard the thought, of course, and perhaps his eyes twinkled in the fast glance he spared him.

“Those are the externals. But we are concerned with the corresponding internal facts, and perhaps first among these is his struggle with conflicting ideals. What happens to a sensitive boy who attempts to hold two ideals, each quite sincerely, that cut against each other? The ruthlessness required to pursue an ideal of excellence may carry over into other parts of life where it conflicts with other values. When it came to writing, Ernest Hemingway did not compromise. He was ruthless in his self-criticism and relentless in his continual experimentation, learning as long as he was able to learn, never relaxing his standard, continually raising the bar higher. He competed against other contemporary writers, against his own limitations, against the masters, and against the invisible limits of the craft.

“Sylvia Beach said she and James Joyce saw Ernest Hemingway as a religious man, Is there not something religious in his day-by-day practical devotion to the ideal of truth, of beauty, of excellence? His life in the physical world is over, and cannot be re-created. But what remains is what he accomplished, internally, in his hard life – and here I refer not to his written works, but to his success in a lifetime of holding together so many inchoate and conflicting potentials. This was his achievement, and it was a solid achievement.”

The defense attorney paused, perhaps to gather his energies, as a horse gathers itself before jumping a hurdle.

“The case for the defense could summarized this way: Ernest Hemingway’s life is an example of a life lived to the full. He was given a spirited team of horses to ride, and he rode them even when they wanted to carry him in opposite directions. He was given great opportunities, and improved upon them. He was given great abilities, and developed them continuously. He sometimes failed to do what he knew he ought to do, and sometimes did what he knew he ought not to do, but he did not fail to live, and to bring to his life as much joy and intensity as possible.

“Ernest Hemingway was one of those people – and they are few in number – whose presence was always noticed. Someone said that he sucked the air out of a room just by entering it. He was instantly the center of attention, not because of anything he did, but because of what he was. And, at the same time, for other people his presence in a room, or his very mention in a conversation was a provocation to attack. Was this because he was a famous writer? A deep-sea fisherman? An aficionado of bullfighting? Was it because he wrote for Esquire magazine and went on safaris and got involved in impromptu boxing matches? I don’t think so. I think it was because he had something that people found irresistibly appealing, the appeal we experience in the presence of wholeness, more alluring than glamour, than success, than fame or riches or beauty. Despite his failures and mistakes, despite his character flaws and his sins of omission and commissions: wholeness. Someone said that greatness is reaching opposite extremes at the same time. This, he did. He was so many men in one. Let me list a few of them.”

.2.

“If you want the key to Ernest Hemingway’s inner life, think of just one phrase: the tension of opposites. You will all remember the many types of men you knew in life. Look how many types Hemingway embodied.

“A master story-teller, above all. Who was a better story-teller than Hemingway?

“A voracious reader. Hemingway absorbed uncounted works of fiction and non-fiction, leaving a library of more than 7,000 books in his home at Finca Vigia.

“A connoisseurs of the visual arts. From Hemingway’s earliest days to his last, he haunted museums and befriended painters, knowing how to distinguish quality.

“Someone with an ear for the musical heritage of mankind. Hemingway loved every musical art form from opera to symphonies to jazz.

“A student of the world around him, inputs wide open, thirsty for first-hand knowledge. A born teacher.

“An intense lover of nature, loving sea and sky, exulting in the wilds of Africa, mourning what America had done to its natural heritage.

“A skillful fisherman and hunter, intent on outwitting and out-maneuvering whatever animal he sought.

“A men with an appetite for the physical pleasures, whether eating and drinking, hiking, riding, skiing, even, as a very young man, playing at fighting the bulls.

“A man who could lead a soldier’s life, mastering its specialized knowledge, its privations, discipline, courage and intensity in Italy, in Spain, in the seas around Cuba, in France.

“A men’s men, always happy in male companionship, always wanting to assemble a mob, always organizing some complicated joint endeavor. A man who had friends among rich and poor, famous and unknown, and those who were for any reason simpatico.

“A lover and admirer of women, hungering for them, observing them closely, valuing their difference, needing their respect and admiration.

“A born leaders of men, always at the center of any gathering, always the prime mover.

“Some have instincts and perceptions that take them half out of the world. That was Ernest Hemingway, with his religious longings and his impossibly high ideals.

“To judge his life by the end of it would be the same kind of error made commonly on earth, where a man’s future is presumed to end at death. Instead, the future, as always, starts now.”

The defense attorney paused. “That is all I have to say. I now invite the defendant to address you directly.” And the defense attorney sat down, giving him a wink.

.3.

So now it was up to him. He felt the nervousness he had always felt when he had to make a speech.

“I cannot defend everything I ever did, The things I did when I knew I was doing wrong are the hardest memories to bear. I wish I could undo them, but of course I can’t. But I wanted to put that on the record before I tried to give you an idea of how I saw my life, what I thought I was doing.

“As a young man, I decided that in life you had to pay as you went along. It’s the philosophy I gave Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises. You pay for anything that’s any good, either by studying it or by experiencing it or by taking chances, or by just paying money. And all the way to the end, I still believed it, only at the end I didn’t have anything left to buy, and nothing to buy it with except money. For most of my life, I paid by working. I worked all the time, the way I read all the time. As long as I could work, I could enjoy life as it came to me.

“I never cared about some abstract definition of the meaning of life. I wanted to know, concretely, day by day, action by action, how to live.  I was living as best I could on my terms that I had set and accepted. That’s why I always planned my fun. That’s why when I learned something, I learned it. That’s why I was so intolerant of so many things and so many types of people that were phony or empty or were just pretending, or were dead at the core.

“I loved life, loved the world. Loved being part of it. Wanted to know everything, experience everything, describe everything. I lived a very rich life in a way that didn’t have anything to do with whether I had a dollar in my pocket. And everybody here knows that my life centered on my creating.

“I loved living in the physical world and I loved living in the imaginal world, and I felt at home in each. When you think of my life, think of a man standing at the boundary line between two worlds – the outer world that he shared with everybody else, and the inner world that was his own. Both worlds were very brightly lit, and in the best times of my life, I spent hours first in one world, then in the other. Hours, every day. If you don’t understand that one fact, you cannot understand my life.”

He turned from the jury and sat down.

The defense attorney said, “That was very well done, Mr. Hemingway. Your honor, the defense rests.”

“Very well. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will withdraw and confer among yourselves, and return when you have reached a unanimous verdict.”

 

“In 1951 came two significant deaths. On June 28, Grace Hall Hemingway. On October 1, Pauline Pfeiffer Hemingway. Please give the court your reaction to these two deaths, if you would.”

“You say `if I would.’ Do I have a choice?”

Bluntly: “No, Mr. Hemingway, you don’t. That’s what this trial is about: facing your past. During life in three dimensions, you put it off as best you could, but here you are out of time, in both senses of the word. Here, you tell the truth. You don’t escape into unconsciousness. You can’t forget, can’t rewrite, can’t even sleep. Start with your mother.”

“We’ve already been through this.”

“No, actually, we have not. Your mother testified about your life as a boy, and you testified about how you had seen her role in your life. Now I ask you to remember your reaction when you learned that she had died, and, before you say anything, do yourself the favor of reliving, rather than leaving yourself at the mercy of the way you remembered.”

He sank into the memories, returned.

“And was it as you thought, Mr. Hemingway?”

He was angry now. “You know it wasn’t.”

“Tell the court what you learned.”

“I learned what you knew I’d learn, nothing. It wasn’t a matter of learning, but of letting the memories back in.”

“Exactly. And what did you discover?”

Oddly, it was difficult even here.

“Mr. Hemingway, you might think of it this way: The greater the difficulty, the greater the difficulty being overcome.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” But, there was something in that. “I was, what, nearly 52. My father had been in the grave more than 20 years, and I was still holding a grudge on his behalf, I suppose. So when I hear that she’s dead, I don’t expect it to affect me. I had had my casualties, plenty of them, and I’d gone on okay.”

“Yes, Mr. Hemingway, we know. You hired out to be tough.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?”

“You tell me. You’re the one who used that line, and over-used it. You’re the one who made a fetish of being able to take it without it affecting you.”

“I was willing to support my mother financially, it was a small price to pay to gain control. Beyond that, I didn’t want anything to do with her. So when I heard she had died, I thought, `Well, that’s that.’ I thought that would be the end of it.”

“But it wasn’t, of course.”

“No. instead, all these memories came flooding in, memories from before I left home.”

“Happy memories, Mr. Hemingway?”

“But I didn’t want them! I fought against them. Kept them as quiet as I could. I bottled it all up, pretended it wasn’t there, and went on with my life as if it didn’t affect me.”

“As we said, you hired out to be tough.”

Exasperated: “That could get tiresome, you know!”

Softly: “Yes, Mr. Hemingway, it could, couldn’t it. So tell the court about the memories that came flooding in.”

“Like she said on the stand, there was a time when we were a happy family. We kids got a lot from both our parents, and in taking dad’s side I forgot the things my mother did for me.” A sudden reverse, out of irritation: “But she really did drive me crazy with her pretensions and her oh-so-artistic disposition, and her half-assed mysticism.” Another reverse: “But I suppose she did the best she could. I wasn’t that great as a parent myself. She took us to the Art Institute of Chicago, and operas, and concerts. I suppose she’s the one who introduced me to the world of books. She taught us what she knew. That’s what I remembered.”

“And is that all, in the way of specific memories of your mother?”

“You’ve been telling me that the point here is that I remember. You know I did. I can’t see why I have to spill my guts when you know anything I’m thinking anyway.”

A pause. “Very well. Three months after your mother passed over, so did your wife Pauline. Kindly tell the court how you received that bit of news.”

Gritting his teeth, in effect: “My feelings were complicated. I had loved Pauline, and at the same time I resented her. You know all that. All the time we lived together, I appreciated her, and I was exasperated by her, and I felt more and more stifled by the life she wanted us to lead. The point is, our relationship was always complicated, even at best. And when I got involved with Marty, and Pauline saw that we were breaking up, she got spiteful and vindictive. Did everything she could, to make my life difficult. Tried to tie me hand and foot financially. And even later, after I had divorced Marty, when our relationship evened out, it was never what you could call level. Any little thing could start us going again.”

“Such as the bad news about your son Gregory.”

“All right. I’m not going to rehash every damn thing that happened. The point is, you asked me how I felt when I heard she was dead. I was still mad from our long-distance argument the night before. I still blamed her for Gregory’s problems. But it was too much to bear.”

“Spell this out carefully for court, if you would. You may find it important.”

The equivalent of a deep breath. “After a while they found out she had a tumor in her brain that probably killed her by pumping out massive amounts of adrenaline. But even before I knew that, as soon as I heard she was dead, I knew it was because we had been fighting. Don’t know how, but I knew. I killed her.”

“Which was too much guilt to bear. So you buried it.”

“That’s exactly what I did. How was I supposed to live with that?”

“And what effect did that have on you, Mr. Hemingway?”

“I don’t understand the question.”

“You thought you knew you had killed her. So you suppressed the knowledge. What effect did suppressing that knowledge have on you?”

He didn’t know, and then he did. “It numbed everything.”

“Of course it would. You didn’t make the connection, I take it.”

“No.”

“So, one last question and we can leave the subject. When Mary accused you of not feeling anything, or of hiding behind a mask of stoicism, what was your reaction? I don’t mean what did you say to her, I mean, how were you affected?”

A new slant. He hadn’t thought to look at it that way. “I was angry, of course. She didn’t understand, and I couldn’t make her understand.”

“Because?”

A revelation. “Because I didn’t understand either! If I didn’t know what I was feeling, how could I know why I was feeling it?”

.2.

“Mr. Hemingway, in 1953, you and your wife left Cuba for Europe and then Africa. Did you have a good time in Africa?”

“Until the airplanes dropping out of the sky, sure. Marvelous time, as good as twenty years before.”

“Did you find that your interests had changed, vis a vis 1933-34?”

He was puzzled for a second. “Oh, I get your point. Yeah, this time I wasn’t interested in collecting trophy heads. I was past all that. I still shot for the pot, and I shot the animals that preyed on the natives’ cattle, and we put a tremendous amount of thought and effort into Mary getting her lion, but mostly I liked just letting it all absorb me again. The animals, the land, the people, it was all so beautiful, and so fragile. Civilization hadn’t quite ruined everything yet.”

“You didn’t feel that you needed to prove you were as good a shot as ever?”

“I didn’t have to prove anything. I had enough trophies at home.”

“Then why did you try to go native? Shaving your head, patrolling in the moonlight armed only with a spear, pretending to be engaged to marry a native woman. What was that about?”

“Didn’t we go over this already? Part of me really, really didn’t like what the world was becoming, and wanted to go back.”

“But that way out was never really open to you, was it?”

“No.”

“So tell the court, how did your safari end?”

“You know how it ended. Mary and I were sightseeing in a light plane that hit a wire and crashed. We were rescued the next day, and Mary and I got into another plane that was going to take us back to civilization to fix us up, and that plane crashed trying to take off.”

“You made light of your injuries in public, but in fact they were severe.”

“More so than I knew, yes. Obviously I knew I had a concussion – my head was actually leaking cerebral fluid – but I didn’t know that the liver, kidneys, spleen and even the sphincter were damaged. Plus I had some pretty bad burns. Got a chance to read my own obits, though, that was interesting. But the second crash worked me over so I never did make up all the ground I lost. I became an old man.”

“When you returned home, you were made a member of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, were you not? And then in October came the Nobel Prize. Proud moments, surely.”

“Well, under the circumstances, they didn’t really mean anything. Batista’s government was looking for anything that would give them a fig-leaf of legitimacy. I wouldn’t let them give it to me in an official government setting. And as to the Swedish thing –.” Aggressively: “And you know I’m not just posing, here.”

“We’ll concede the sincerity of your position.”

“If prizes weren’t political, they would mean something. But that kind of prize comes for only one of two reasons. Either they give it to you for some political reason of their own, or they give it because they have to, because you’ve outlived and outworked so many non-entities they already gave it to, it’s embarrassing them. They said this time I’d written about an uplifting subject and an admirable man – as if Spain and Robert Jordan weren’t enough. So, like I say, it didn’t mean much to me. Plus, the award destroyed what was left of our privacy. We wound up living under siege, and we had to get away on the boat if we wanted to be alone.”

“Fortunately, you had your work.”

“Yes, but you can have good conditions to work in or bad ones. I was writing about Africa, and then I had to set it aside in 1955 to help with trying to film The Old Man and the Sea.’ Waste of time. And when I was able to get back to writing, I couldn’t get back to the Africa piece. I wrote a few stories about the war in Europe, instead.”

“And in 1956 you returned to Europe.”

“I did. Paris and Spain and back to Paris. Saw some good bullfights in Spain.”

“All this time you were still plagued by ill health. Did you not spend 60 days in bed, at one point?”

Metaphorically he waved the topic aside. “I never found it paid to discuss casualties. I already told you, those plane crashes took it out of me. What’s the point dwelling on things that can’t be helped?”

“Let us summarize briefly, then. When you returned to Cuba from Paris, you worked on different manuscripts at different times.”

“I did. Sometimes I went back to work on my African novel, sometimes I worked on a story I called “The Garden of Eden.” Never finished either one. If my head had stayed good, maybe I could have, I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t. I also worked on a memoir of Paris and Hadley, and I got that more or less finished.”

“Then on Dec. 31, 1958, Batista fled Cuba.”

“I was in Idaho for the winter. Certainly was glad to see the old bastard go. But I had a premonition right away that this wasn’t going to work out for me. The U.S. government had been in bed with Batista for so long, relations with the rebels were going to be strained. I figured our government was likely to put pressure on the Cubans, and it wouldn’t take much for the revolution to become anti-American. Even if the Cubans were willing to make an exception for me, how was I going to be able to stay there? So I bought a house in Idaho. If I got kicked out of Cuba, I wasn’t going to end up living in New York.”

“You spent a good part of 1959 in Spain and, in fact, you celebrated your 60th birthday in Spain.”

“Yes, an extravaganza that Mary organized. She was a great organizer. Can we just skip the whole thing about how I behaved toward her?”

“Yes, we can. Do you know why?”

“Because you already have enough for an ample indictment?”

“Because you are aware of your actions and their consequences. All right, in July, 1960, you left Cuba by the Key West ferry to return to Spain to acquire more material for `The Dangerous Summer.’”

“And that was the last I saw of Cuba. You know how I had Jordan say he was learning quickly at the end? Well, at the end I was losing quickly: my health, my strength, my mental stability, the finca, Cuba. It wasn’t long before I was losing my sanity, and when I ended it, I was in the process of losing my freedom. The times were never good, but these were the worst I ever saw.”

“A few questions about your friends, Mr. Hemingway.”

He sighed. “Go ahead.”

“It was observed that the kinds of people you included in your `mobs’ changed over time.”

“My friends were whoever it was that I liked. I was continually assembling floating communities of people. If my mob changed, it was because I was always changing. Some years I might not be the same person six months running. With each change, naturally I’m going to attract different individuals. I made my community as I went along. But every physical community I ever had was destroyed for me. Paris in the twenties. Key West in the thirties, Cuba in the forties and fifties.”

“Allow me to suggest this, then. Perhaps your friends experienced you as a magnetic field evoking parts of their personality that they never saw otherwise. Would that not make you very attractive, almost regardless what you did, and would it not perhaps sometimes make them feel like hangers-on?”

“Which would make them resent me, maybe not even knowing why. That’s an interesting idea.”

“Some people call that kind of attraction charisma, and charisma can’t be fabricated, or earned, and it isn’t accidental. It is a gift from the gods.”

He felt for his reaction to it. “It wasn’t anything I did consciously. But it’s true, there was something about me. People seemed to be drawn to me.”

“Then try out this thought. Perhaps charisma comes with wholeness. Does it seem true to you that the charisma people experienced from you may have resulted from your feeling and expressing your connection to the whole world?”

He started to shy away from the question. “This isn’t the kind of thing –“

“I know, Mr. Hemingway. But you can’t really plead your limitations here. Did you, or did you not, exude a charismatic presence during most of your life?”

“If I did, it went away.”

“Yes, it did, after the airplane crashes.”

“I worked hard to come back from my injuries, but my friends were mostly gone, and my enthusiasm, and my confidence. By the time I got to Idaho, my body was failing, and there I was with five more bulls to kill. You want to know about my friends. Can I call a couple of witnesses?”

“Proceed, Mr. Hemingway.”

“I call Gregorio Fuentes.” And presto, there he was, even though he remained alive and well in the physical world.

.3.

“Gregorio, mi amigo, how are you?”

“I was sad,” Fuentes said, “but now I see you and I am happy again. You are healthy, you are whole.” He was speaking Spanish, but everyone in the courtroom understood what he was saying.

“And that is how it will be with you as well.”

“God willing, not for many years. I believe you, but I can wait.”

They shared a laugh and he wished they had a drink they could share, as they had for so many years.

“Gregorine, tell the court how we worked together.”

“It was very simple. You hired me to take care of Pilar, and that is what I did.”

“And anything that needed to be done, you knew how to do it.”

“I had been many years on the ocean. That is no place to have to depend on another to do for you.”

“But I did depend on you, Gregorio. If I needed you to pilot, you could do it. If I needed you to take a long watch, steering, you could do it. All through the time we went looking for U-Boats, you cooked for us, you kept the ship running well – you did everything.”

“It is as I said, at sea a man needs to be able to depend on himself.”

“Mi amigo, you observed me over many years. Will you tell the court how I was with the fishermen and the common people in all that time?”

“You were a great favorite, the rich Americano who caught big fish and often gave the meat to the poor, the fisherman who gave away even the shark liver, a powerful medicine. The man who paid the best wages and treated those who worked for him like family. Children and dogs know a good heart, and all children liked you.”

“If only it had been true of women!”

A dry chuckle. “There, you had as much as you could accommodate, I think.” He shook his head severely. “But you allowed yourself to believe too many stories of a man’s bad luck. Some who were without worth took you to be a silver mine.”

He laughed. “Never mind, Gregorio, it didn’t matter, I had plenty.”

“It is never good to encourage those who will not do for themselves.”

“Mi amigo, thank you. I look forward to seeing you here when you are finished with the body.”

“Again I remind you, I am in no hurry.” And Fuentes was gone, back into a life that would not remember this visit.

“If I may call another witness, your honor, I wish to call my majordomo, René Villereal.”

“You may.”

.4.

René was as he must be in the physical world, just a little past thirty, not much older than the last time he had seen him. His face was shining with happiness.

“Mi hijo cubano.” And that’s how he thought of him, his Cuban son.

“Papa.”

“You heard the same rumors about my dying, too, eh?”

René’s eyes were shining. “Miss Mary called me to tell me.”

Yes, Mary had loved him too.

“René, this is a procedure examining the life that I led, and I have asked that they let you tell them certain things. I should explain to them that you and I were friends since I first moved to the Finca in 1940, when you were 10 or 11 years old. When I was away at the war, you were a faithful caretaker even though you were a boy. You were careful in everything you did. You served me so faithfully and well that I made you chief of all the servants when you were only 17. Over many years, you never failed me. And you know we loved you, Miss Mary and I, and Miss Martha before her.”

“I do know, Papa. And you know that I and my parents and my brothers and sisters loved you as well, and Fanny, mi esposa of many years. You may be sure, also, that my children will be raised to remember you well.”

“René, what can you remember of our years together?”

“I remember every single thing that ever happened, ever since you came to the house as the new owner and told us children that now we could play in your yard and take the fruit that had fallen and we would not be chased away. You said, only do not throw stones at the trees to bring down the fruit.”

“I believe you do remember everything. Your memory is everything mine used to be. René, you knew the life of the servants. Were they content in their positions?”

René’s serious face took on something of Gregorio’s expression: “Always some people are discontented with their position. But no one had reason for complaint if he was careful and did  the job he was paid for. No one paid better wages than you did, and no one treated his employees better. Everyone knew that. Everyone knew that a job with Papa was a thing of importance, was a thing of good fortune. Papa, I may say more?”

“Say what you please, René. That was always our way, wasn’t it?”

“When my child died, you attended the funeral at the back of the procession, and you did not come into the graveyard for the burial. I knew these things, and I knew why. You gave work to many people, and you helped others to find work elsewhere. My own father you helped get a good job, when I was still a boy and would not eat in your house for shame because I knew my family was hungry. You did many kindnesses, and you did not want people to know about them, but we knew. And you never treated anyone differently because he was black instead of white. There are many reasons why you were loved, Papa.”

His heart was full. Mil gracias, Rene, y vaya con Dios.”

.5.

Turning his attention to the judge: “And as you see, I had many reasons why I loved Cuba and its people. That’s really all I want to say.”

“Noted. Is the prosecution nearly concluded?”

“Nearly, your honor. If the court has no objection, I propose to provide a fast summary of your final months, rather than elicit the information through testimony.”

“This time, your honor, the defense has no objection.”

“Proceed.”

“You left Cuba for the last time in July, 1960, and spent the fall in Idaho. Your mental and physical health had begun to fail even before your final trip to Spain, and in November, 1960, you agreed to a stay at the Mayo Clinic, in Minnesota.”

“Yes,” he growled. “Big mistake. But by then, Mary was calling the shots.”

“Look carefully, Mr. Hemingway.”

He did. “Okay, not entirely. She wanted me to go to Menninger’s, but she knew I’d never agree to it.”

“You were taking an assortment of medicines, whose side-effects when combined were unknown. Your moods were increasingly irrational. Your fears were overwhelming your sense of reality. Agreed?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I see it, now.”

“Mayo administered shock treatments.”

Grimly: “They certainly did. Try adding shock treatments to a history of concussions and see what you get. For one thing, I lost my memories.”

“They said the memories would return.”

“They said they thought they would return.”

“By January they were convinced that you had improved enough to be discharged. You returned to your home in Idaho, but by April your weight had dropped to a little above 160.”

“Yes, and in April the CIA put a bunch of rebels ashore at the Bay of Pigs, and I knew that I would never be able to return to Cuba. I was ready to kill myself – I had the shotgun out and was ready to load the shells –  but I let Mary and George Saviers talk me out of it. They put me in the hospital for the weekend, and as soon as I got out, I tried again, a couple of times, but I still didn’t have any luck.”

“You were returned to the Mayo Clinic against your will.”

“Yes I was, and I got to experience more shock treatments, which was fun. I was in the end-game anyway, but now I’d lost everything.”

“Nonetheless, within a matter of a few weeks, you succeeded in persuading the doctors that you were cured.”

“Well, sure, that’s what those shock treatments were supposed to do, wasn’t it? Change my attitude. Fine, if that’s what they wanted to believe, that’s what I’d give ’em. What would you have done? I was fighting for my life, here!”

“Fighting for a chance to die, you mean.”

“My life had become insupportable. Mary saw it, she just couldn’t admit it in public. When you have had a full life and much of it was very fine and you know that you will never again be clean and whole: Why not step through the doorway?” A pause, then, humorously: “Not as final as I thought, as it turns out.”

.6.

“Last point, Mr. Hemingway. Psychologist Carl Jung said that `The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.’ In thinking about your last days, do you agree with that statement?”

Interested: “I never happened to hear that. Never read Jung, though I heard about him, of course.”

“You might be interested to know that he died less than a month ago, on June 6.”

“Anniversary of D-Day. Huh. What was your question?”

“Do you think that your own mental illness was caused by your unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell me.”

“You know the rules. What you struggle with becomes yours. What you are given is only hearsay.”

“Okay, but you’re going to have to give me some help, here. What does he mean by legitimate suffering?”

“For our purposes, I think we may take it to be the result of allowing yourself to know what you have done.”

“In other words, the process we’ve been going through right here.”

“The less introspection in normal life, Mr. Hemingway, the greater the need for it thereafter.”

“Swell.” He waited for clarity. “I suppose it’s saying mental illness stops you from seeing clearly. If I could have observed my own inner weather the way I learned to observe weather at sea, how different my life would have been! Is that it?”

“Your life would still have had problems, but they would have been different problems.”

“I can see that as I aged, my mood-swings got more violent, and I was taking the mood as an accurate reflection of the world.”

“Naturally. If you refuse to see your shadow side, you distort your experience of reality. If you do it long enough and consistently enough, you become ever less able to respond appropriately to circumstances, because the circumstances reported to your conscious mind are distorted. You can reach a point of no return, because incoming reality is so different from how it is perceived. Can you see why you had to blame certain situations on other people?”

“It would have been too painful to admit. My actions weren’t living up to my ideals.”

“And that was part of the price of those ideals, you wound up disenfranchising parts of yourself that didn’t measure up.”

“You’re saying I couldn’t see myself or my life straight, and so I got farther and farther off course.”

“Let’s say, you found it too painful to see the past as it had been, so you walled yourself off from reminders. If you had seen yourself more accurately, you would have seen those around you more accurately. It would have relieved the anxiety, the paranoia, the depression.” Intensely: “But this was all tied in to your idealization of yourself. That was how you created yourself, and how you held yourself to impossibly high standards of craftsmanship that you did largely achieve. But that same high standard guaranteed that you are never going to do good enough or be good enough to satisfy yourself. Hence the bragging, hence the anxious competitiveness.”

“So on the one hand, I was an example of wholeness, and on the other hand I wasn’t, and my life spun out of control.”

“You are being sarcastic, but that is not so wrong a statement. One might almost say that your problem was caused by your attempt to live an impossibly high ideal. Nothing wrong with that, provided you realize that you won’t be able to live your ideal to your own satisfaction. Nobody can. You needn’t feel compelled to come to some sort of judgment.”

“I thought that’s what we were doing! What’s a trial, if it isn’t a judging?”

“Mr. Hemingway.”

“Yes, your honor??”

“This process has nothing to do with acquittal or conviction. We do not deal in innocence or guilt. It certainly has nothing to do with reward and punishment.”

“Then I don’t understand what we have been doing.”

“Everyone reviews his life in the 3D world upon completing it, but not everyone experiences the review as a trial. For you it was a appropriate format, because it conforms with that you expected – dreaded – if only unconsciously. For someone else, it would be wildly inappropriate.”

“So it’s a sham?”

“Not at all. A dramatization, perhaps, but with very real consequences.”

“Then –”

“We’re nearly at the end. You will see. There is no need for the prosecution to summarize the criticisms that could be leveled: You will have done that internally.”

“Ad nauseam.”

“Yes. Well, we will listen to the closing argument for the defense, and then the jury will retire to deliberate.”

“But not a verdict of guilty or innocent. So –?”

“You will see. Is the defense prepared to deliver its summation?”

“We are, your honor.”

“Proceed.”

 

“Mr. Hemingway, the years from 1940 to 1950 look like a long dry spell in your career, with nothing published other than the Men At War anthology you edited and the journalism you did for PM and Collier’s. Did this long dry spell worry you?”

“Of course it did. I had lost five years of my career.”

“Five? Not ten?”

“I didn’t publish for ten years, but the only time lost was from 1940 to October, 1945, when the mechanism started working again. I was hoping to write about the war, but I couldn’t start there. I needed to reconnect with the man I had been before the war. So I went back to a story I had started years earlier, that was set in Bimini in 1936. It centered on two friends, a writer named Roger Davis and a painter named Thomas Hudson. They were middle-aged men living with what life and their own errors had left them.

“Roger Davis was a writer who had prostituted his talent and wasted a good deal of his life in Hollywood. Visiting Thomas Hudson, he resolves to try again to get his life straight. Thomas Hudson was a good painter, and he had not prostituted his talents. But he had lost plenty too, especially including his wives, one of whom he still loved. He was trying to keep himself in harmony by a careful routine. He worked, he read, he fished, he drank. He had lost plenty, but he still had the world, and the use of his talents, and sometimes his three children.

“I had Roger and his girl fly to Miami, intent on driving to Thomas Hudson’s place out West so Roger can write. He drives and observes himself and observes the countryside. He is politically aware, and he reads about the revolt in Spain and thinks he is going to have to go fight fascism at some point. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with Roger. I got them as far as New Orleans, but all I could think to do was set that part aside and return to Thomas Hudson. Maybe Roger was going to be killed in Spain. Spain killed enough idealists, God knows, even cynical ones. But I had already written about Spain.

“Hudson’s part of the story is pretty happy, and then it turns, in the abrupt and sickening way life can, sometimes. He gets a telegram telling him that the younger two boys have been killed in an accident.”

“So now Thomas Hudson has lost two out of three of his sons.”

“Yes. That’s what the story is about, loss and carrying on after loss. From that prewar scene, I went to Thomas Hudson in wartime Havana, trying to live with his emptiness and grief after young Tom got killed flying Spitfires. I had wanted to write about air warfare, but I needed more experience than a few hours in the air. I didn’t have it and couldn’t get it. So young Tom died off-stage. I could imagine his emotions easily enough, from the time I had heard that Jack had been shot and captured and maybe killed. Then I wrote up a sea chase in a Q-boat, with Thomas Hudson and his men pursuing the survivors of a sunken U-Boat. These were things I knew.

“I worked on that book on and off for years, and finished it mostly to my satisfaction, but I never quite found a way to make the transition between the prewar section and the war years. It’s a manuscript sitting in my bank, ‘The Island and the Stream.’ I thought I’d have another 10 or 15 productive years, so there wasn’t any hurry about getting it right. I didn’t count on Max dying, and Charlie Scribner.”

“This trial centers on you and not your work, but your stories help make certain things clear. In 1936, Roger Davis sees the absolute danger that fascism represents, and believes he has a duty to oppose it. In 1943, Thomas Hudson wasn’t engaged in the world war with his heart, only with his head.”

“Maybe Thomas Hudson was Roger with fewer illusions.”

“In any case, both men are different aspects of yourself.”

“Let’s say both men are aspects of the way I sometimes experienced myself.”

“You did not publish ‘The Island and the Stream,’ but you did publish Across The River And Into The Trees, your story about land warfare.”

“Yes, and apparently it didn’t please anybody but the public. It did make the best-seller lists.”

“Perhaps after that long wait for a new Hemingway novel, the critics expected another epic.”

He shrugged. “Possibly. They would have loved set-piece battles, I imagine, and I could have written them. But why would I want to do the same thing twice? That wasn’t what I was after. I wanted to write about a heart-sick soldier looking back at his life. He was sick of war, sick of stupidity and suffering, even sick of himself. I was showing a dying man in love with a young woman – Beatrice to his Dante – seeking absolution for the things he had done and not done. I showed him touching painful  memories and then backing away, and then finding healing in her understanding. But a lot of people seemed to miss the point. Maybe the book wasn’t right for the times. Maybe a worn-out soldier was not everybody’s idea of a hero. But my old buddy Chink was a career soldier, and when he read it he said why hadn’t I ever told him that I understood sorrow.”

“Do you think maybe you pushed your iceberg theory too far in this book?”

“Well, maybe. It shouldn’t have been too far. Readers should have been able to get it, and, after all, many of them did. Maybe it’s just that fewer people can do trigonometry than can do simple math. But anyway, it was worth doing for its own sake. The indirect description of the aftereffects of battle and warfare was as well done as I could. If it was too far for my critics, I can’t help that. In time the book will rise or sink, and it won’t have much to do with the judgment of the critics of 1950.”

“Then let us proceed to Colonel Richard Cantwell and you.”

“You aren’t taking my stories as biography, I hope.”

“Hardly. But this is a convenient way to examine certain aspects of the writer and the man at the mid-century mark. Across the River and Into the Trees. Autobiography? Wish-fulfillment? What?”

“Across the River was the most misrepresented of all my stories, and perhaps the one the most underrated. I told people, I was trying to achieve the fourth dimension in my writing. I suppose nobody knew what I was talking about. Instead of reading the story as a story, the critics practiced psychiatry without a license on me. They couldn’t seem to grasp what I was doing.”

“Here’s your chance to enlighten us.”

“I was telling the story not quite from inside Colonel Cantwell’s point of view. It was more like God was showing you Cantwell’s mental world. So you see things that Cantwell could never have explained, and you see other things he couldn’t see in himself. Within his mind, he remembers his past, both what he has experienced and what he has experienced second-hand from reading, say, or from other instruction or from appreciating a painting. I was trying to achieve a viewpoint beyond viewpoint, you see, what I called the fourth dimension. You can’t actually do it, but even hinting at going beyond viewpoint is difficult. I believe I came pretty close to achieving it there, and it was disappointing to have it not recognized. And here is something nobody saw. A couple of years later, in The Old Man and the Sea, with Santiago, I achieved the fifth dimension.”

“How did you do that?”

“I got the reader beyond time, by sitting on the very edge of the moving line. There are other ways – Tolstoy did it on a mammoth scale – but this was how I did it. By carefully recounting his actions, his thoughts, his memories, his emotions, moment by moment, I stayed so close to the moving present that we got beyond time to the timeless. That’s where that strange aura around the story came from. It wasn’t told from Santiago’s viewpoint, or from Manolin’s. It may be said to be narrated by God, in a way. It was life described from neither within life nor outside of life. Beyond the story itself, there is something that people feel but don’t quite understand.”

“That story came as a gift to you, perhaps.”

“Oh, I’m clear on that. I had been honing my skill for decades, but I could not have produced the story to order. As you say, it was a gift. I had been thinking about The Old Man and the Sea that for 15 years, but I wrote it in the first six weeks of 1951, and it came to me as nothing else ever did. It was a gift from somewhere. The people who thought it was simple or simpleminded are the ones who couldn’t sense the presence of that extra dimension.”

“It was the most successful love story you ever published.”

“Yes it was, the one that finally shamed the committee into giving me the Nobel Prize. The old man loved the world, and his life, and everything in his life, including the boy who loved him. He loved the fish he caught, and God who had put him there, and even certain things about the sharks. I called him a tough old man of great unconscious pride and no arrogance. Probably he would have seemed arrogant in his strength in his middle years but he had learned humility, the way a man at night in the ocean might see his place in the world.”

“Because he had learned through defeat, perhaps?”

“No, because he wasn’t defeated. He had been defeated in one specific thing, that’s all. That’s one reason I ended the book with him dreaming about the lions. It was to make clear that he was still himself, in essence undefeated. He had had a full life and it had come down to a few symbols that came to him when he dreamed. He didn’t dream of his wife, or of women he had known, or the Negro he had beaten at arm wrestling. He did not dream of triumphs or defeats, but of lions as he had seen them and heard them on a far-off shore long before when he was a boy, and when he was a young man. They were beyond being taken away by anything that could happen to him. He didn’t know what caused precisely those things to remain, he just knew that this is what he had left. Perhaps the connection could be broken if he were to do something unworthy, but no external event could break it.”

“His life had come down to himself alone, then. Himself and maybe the boy and the baseball scores.”

“No, no, that isn’t it at all. He wasn’t alone, not in the way a secular American would be. That’s why I had him pray a Hail Mary and then add, `Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. Wonderful though he is.’ The Virgin, the saints, are company for him as they are for all believers. That is what unbelievers do not understand, because they have not experienced it, and because of what they do believe in: science, politics, ideology, whatever. It stops them from understanding that old man. But maybe this story made them feel what they couldn’t understand. I think it did.”

“So what was the point of the talk of beisbol and Joe DiMaggio? Was it to show that Santiago was only a simple man?”

“It was to show that he and the boy were not educated. It also showed a valid aspect of their lives, tied in second hand to Yanqui baseball teams that practiced in Cuba. The old man followed the box scores and sometimes wished for a radio so that he could hear the games. He had heard of DiMaggio having a bone spur and knew that it was painful but didn’t quite know what it was. He used DiMaggio’s bone spur to give himself courage against pain. And that gave American reader a common reference point. The fact that it means something different to the old man reminds the reader that it is a different society. That the boy and others share the obsession and the way of seeing it reminds the reader that it is not the old man’s peculiarity.”

“In 1952 Life magazine published `The Old Man and the Sea’ complete in one issue, and in 48 hours sold six million copies. The following week, Scribner’s published the book and it moved straight to the best-sellers list. The following year, it won you the Pulitzer Prize. Tell the court how you were affected by this concentrated success.”

“There’s a big difference between success and recognition, counselor. The recognition was nice, but it didn’t affect me much. If you let yourself get dependent on people’s reaction to what you write, you put yourself out of business. The success was being able to put that story into words, and I had savored that, months before. By the time everybody got all het up about `The Old Man and the Sea,’ I was living another story I thought of as `The Last Good Country.’ What people don’t realize is that the kick comes not from external success but from the process of getting it right. And you know I’m telling the truth, because I don’t have any choice here.”

“Thank you. I think that gives us a good portrait of Hemingway the artist steadily at work in the postwar years.”

 

“When you returned to Cuba, what did you find?”

“The war had run over the Finca like everything else. I had the staff and the money to do what was needed, but you don’t overcome years of neglect in ten minutes. Even my cats were half-starved.”

“And you? What shape were you in?”

“I was tired. It was like recuperating from a fever. You have to push through this gray haze of fatigue that muffles things and makes it hard to think anything is worth bothering about. You inch your way back into life, you make adjustments.” A pause. “I was having nightmares. I was having these terrific headaches. I couldn’t do any mental work. I was finding that I thought slower and spoke slower, I was forgetting words. Sometimes I had ringing in my ears, sometimes I couldn’t hear right. Jose Herrera said it was because I drank after the concussion, and didn’t rest. He said there wasn’t much I could do to repair the mechanism other than take it easy and get myself in shape.”

“Did you ask him about resuming writing?”

“I wasn’t ready to do that even if I had been in good condition, but he said I should do only a little brain work each day, take my time, and hope to God the old writing machinery wasn’t gone for good.”

“And then Mary Welsh arrived to take up residence. Your honor, the prosecution recalls Mary Hemingway.”

.2.

“Mrs. Hemingway, in May, just before VE Day, you arrived in Cuba, an entirely new environment, beginning a new life. How would you describe your situation, those first months?”

“It was difficult. Everything seemed so chaotic, and everything revolved around Ernest and his friends and his interests, mainly hunting and fishing, which were things I didn’t know anything about. I had no place for myself, nothing that was mine. I had no experience with servants or with running a household larger than two people, and I hadn’t yet begun to learn Spanish. And I was very much aware that I had no independent source of income. Sometimes it felt like I had put myself into prison. Today we would say, `golden handcuffs.’ That’s a perfect description of my life at the time.”

“Yet you stayed.”

“Well – I almost didn’t. In June I was supposed to fly back to the States to complete my divorce, and if I had gotten on that airplane, I might never have returned. But we had a car crash on the way to the airport, and it took me two months at the finca to recover. Ernest was a different man during those months, very solicitous, really listening when I told him I needed an orderly life, rather than a continuous round of surprises and disruptions. And I began to be really happy.”

“Did that happiness last after you returned to the States?”

“Whenever I was away, his letters were very loving, and filled with the best intentions. And he meant what he said, I knew that. But then when we were together, things would flare up again. So, when I returned to Cuba, I was happy to be back and he was happy to have me back, but it was only a matter of a few days before I was feeling smothered.”

“So, would you say you were happy, or not?”

“Well, it is sometimes difficult to know what’s realistic. Life is never going to be all sweetness and light. So, we make allowances. How much darkness can we accommodate and still say we are happy? We learn that the question of whether we are happy is more than any particular moment.”

“Would you agree that the relationship was volatile right from the beginning?”

“I would have to. Between the time I met him in May and the time he left for America, I had learned what he could be like in a rage. I had had all those ardent letters from the front, then the first time I see him in Paris, he gives me a tongue-lashing for supposedly being rude to his drunken friends. It showed me another side to him that I had heard about but hadn’t really believed in.”

“Did it give you pause?”

“Mr. Prosecutor, many things gave me pause. In some ways, there was just too much of him for any one person to handle. I wrote him one day that I had avoided him because I needed to have a few hours without feeling overwhelmed by his intensity. The thought of living with that intensity, day by day, for the rest of my life – it terrified me, sometimes. Not always, and not only that. Mostly it exhilarated me, filled me with excitement, but it terrified me, too.”

“Nonetheless, you decided to be with him after the war?”

“How many people get to be with Ernest Hemingway? I could see that it was going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, but I was willing to take the chance. And I’m not saying all our problems were Ernest’s fault.”

“Would you say that you and he developed a sort of routine around that volatility? A dance? A sort of call-and-response?”

A long hesitation. “Do you mean, do I see my own responsibility for what went on?”

“Mrs. Hemingway, I remind you, this proceeding centers on the defendant, not on you. We merely seek to obtain a clear understanding of the situation as you experienced it.”

Slowly: “There was a pattern, of course. If he attacked, I would attack right back. I had to: It would have been impossible to live with him if I had let him run all over me. There was a big streak of bully in Ernest, and sometimes he would get his way by being as ugly as he could, in public as well as in private, until the woman gave in. I don’t think that worked with Martha, and I wasn’t about to let it work with me. I’d keep at him until he apologized.”

“And when he apologized?”

“It depended on how bad it had gotten. If I said I was going to leave, he would beg me to stay, and for a while he would be very loving again.”

“So you understood what was going on, if only instinctively? And you evolved a strategy to cope with it? Perhaps secure advantage from it?”

“I understood his part in it, certainly, and I did what I had to in order to maintain my self-respect.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Hemingway. No further questions. The prosecution recalls the defendant.”

.3.

“Mr. Hemingway, would you agree with your wife’s description of your marriage?”

“You want me to say I was a bully?”

“I want you – this court wants you – to look into the pattern of your relationship.”

A sigh. “Getting used to this.” A moment to settle in, and then he found himself drawing unexpected connections. “With Hadley, it was simple. Her mother and sister were always telling her she couldn’t do anything, and she half believed it. She was shy and pretty much afraid of the world, so I could be the front man for the two of us and we were both happy that way. That’s why she didn’t object to my making all the decisions about money; it’s what she expected. But with Pauline, well she had her own career and her own money – a lot more money than I had – and I had to be careful that she didn’t get the upper hand. I see that now, People noticed how rough I treated her, sometimes. I’d have to think more about it, but I’d bet those were pretty much always times I felt I had to keep control.”

“And with Miss Gellhorn?”

He laughed. “Marty, there was no controlling Marty, she’d just wear you down. She had all those firm opinions about things, whether she knew what she was talking about or not, and she let you know.”

“Did she remind you of your mother, then?”

“No, she wasn’t interested in reshaping me, she just never stopped complaining when I did things she didn’t like. Marty, you know, did what she wanted to do. That was okay with me up to a point, but when she went off to Finland, I knew I’d never be first with her.”

“But Mary?”

“Look, I know she tried. She was willing to give up her job with Time and live without an independent income. She learned another language and another way of living, I recognize all that. But that doesn’t mean our life together was ever going to be easy.”

“Mr. Hemingway, your divorce with Martha Gellhorn was finalized on December 21, 1945. You married Mary Welsh on March 14, 1946. Why the delay?”

A shrug. “We had been living together since May; we didn’t see any urgency.”

“Were there, perhaps, second thoughts?”

“There were on Mary’s part, as you know. On mine, no.”

“No wistful memories of Martha? No regrets?”

“None. That chapter of my life was closed.”

“Tell us, then, why did you keep Miss Gellhorn’s belongings after the divorce?”

A blank look. “I sued her for desertion. Under Cuban law, in such cases all joint possessions go to the injured party.

“Yes, that gave you legal ownership. Did that it mean it was right to keep them?”

“Ownership is ownership, Mr. Prosecutor.”

“But not in the case of the Miro painting, `The Farm,’ that you borrowed from your first wife and never returned?”

“Well – I’m the one who paid for that painting.”

“And Miss Gellhorn is the one who paid for her possessions.”

He couldn’t think of a response.

“Defense? Your witness.”

“Mr. Hemingway,  I suggest that it would be in your best interest to examine the question posed by the prosecutor. You were a man capable of much generosity. Why in this instance did you act as you did?”

“This is a funny trial, where the two lawyers cooperate with each other.”

“Our intent is for you to better understand yourself. So, please examine your motives.”

“There wasn’t a lot of stuff involved. It wasn’t any big deal.”

The defense attorney looked at him, and waited,  then said, “No further questions, your honor.”

The prosecutor said, “The prosecution recalls Martha Gellhorn.”

.4.

“Miss Gellhorn, when you and your husband agreed that he would sue you for divorce in Cuba, did the question of your possessions come up?”

“I never thought about it. I just assumed he would do the right thing. Stupid of me.”

“The defendant has testified that little was involved. Do you agree?”

“He kept everything! My family silver and china and stemware, my clothes, even my typewriter. My furniture, which I didn’t care about, but still it was mine. He kept it all. Eventually Mary offered to return the things that had come down through my family. But when the package arrived, the china was all chipped and the crystal was shattered.  And I had even paid for the shipment. But what can you do? Getting free of Ernest was still worth the price.”

“Defense?”

“No questions.”

“Mr. Hemingway, does Miss Gellhorn’s testimony refresh your memory?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“This court would like you to answer the question. Why did you act that particular way in that particular instance?”

He sighed. “I guess I was just being a bastard.”

“But the question remains, why? What caused those actions? Examine it, Mr. Hemingway.”

Yet more dredging, and he didn’t much like what he was finding. “Having it both ways, I suppose. I was glad to get free of her, but I resented that she was glad to be free of me. So I took it out however I could, and told myself whatever I needed to hear to justify it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hemingway. We can go on to other things.”

“I certainly hope so. God, how much more of this?” He hadn’t intended to say it; it had come on its own.

The prosecutor considered him. “There are serious things that need to be examined, but we aren’t going to go through everything that you did and thought and said in your final 15 years, if that concerns you. And we will not neglect to consider your life as artist. For instance: Would we be wrong to describe your life in Cuba as a form of exile? Compared, say, to your time in Paris after the first war?”

“Apples and oranges, Mr. Prosecutor. In Paris in the twenties, I was young and I was surrounded by genius and near-genius and maybe-who-knows genius. It was an active, varied, interesting life full of promise and I was working well among comrades even if they were rivals. In Cuba I wasn’t just one among many. Havana was not a literary center! So the stimulus of personal competition among peers was gone. And life in your 40s and 50s is bound to be different anyway. Maybe it was easier to live only at the periphery. I had money in the bank, and I could work at my own pace. I was living mentally, spiritually, in an earlier version of America that no longer existed.”

.5.

“Mr. Hemingway, the year 1947. The writing machinery was working again and you were piling up manuscript. Every so often you received visits from friends such as Buck Lanham. Your sons had accepted Mary as they had accepted her predecessors. In many respects, as 1947 dawned, you were doing well.”

“At first. But that turned into a bitch of a year, like 1941. Patrick in April, and then Max dies in June, and the Dominican thing in August, and Katy getting killed in September in a car accident.”

“Please tell the court about Patrick.”

“At the time Pat must have been about 18. He and Gigi had been visiting Pauline, and he came back to the finca and resumed studying for his college boards. But he kept complaining about headaches. I knew that he and Gigi had been in an accident in a car while they were in Key West, and he had banged his head. It sounded to me like he’d had a concussion and nobody had done anything to help him recover from it.”

“He didn’t treat it by drinking massive amounts of alcohol, at any rate.”

He grinned. “No, he didn’t try his old man’s therapy.” The grin faded. “But he was doing all that brain-work. One day he’s taking his boards in Havana, and a couple of days later he runs a fever, becomes delirious, and turns violent, and has to be watched day and night. And this is Patrick, who has always been such a quiet friendly boy.”

“So what did you do?”

“Mary’s father had prostate cancer, and she had to fly off to Chicago to be with him. She went, and she should have gone. But it left me short-handed, so I called in Sinsky and Roberto Herrera to take shifts with me. And then Pauline flew over to help take care of her son.”

“Did you tell Mary Pauline was there?”

“Of course I did, and in fact Pauline wrote to her directly. She stayed three weeks, and was a big help. And then after Mary came back, Pauline came over again, and to my surprise, they liked each other, I guess because there was no rivalry between them. Anyway, by then the worst was over with Patrick, and in a few more months he made a full recovery, but I’ll tell you, it wore me out. I took the midnight-to-eight a.m. shift, you see, which meant that the sleep I got was mostly catnaps. You can do that for quite a while, but not forever.”

“So then, Maxwell Perkins?”

“Max was the middle of June, just a couple of days after the army gave me the Bronze Star. He just up and died, of pneumonia and exhaustion. Dammit, it always took an act of Congress to get him to take time off from work. Yes, he was a great editor. But wouldn’t he have been an even greater editor if he had had more years to do the job? I always wanted him to give himself more time off, but there was no reasoning with him, he always had reasons why this wasn’t a good time. And then he was gone, and I can’t tell you how much I missed him. He was a great editor and a great friend, and when you lose somebody like Max you can feel it, something’s gaining on you.”

“And then there was the incident of the revolutionaries and the Dominican Republic.”

“Yeah.” He was embarrassed. “Agent 007 versus the dictator. I guess you know the background. Rafael Trujillo, another son of a bitch like Franco, was running the Dominican Republic. He still had the army and the ricos, but these rebels were organizing an army in Cuba to throw him out.”

“And you thought they could succeed?”

“I had hope, let’s put it that way. This particular bunch contacted me, and I got involved a little bit, and maybe I would have gotten in further, but just at the time their preparations for an invasion were coming to a head, Patrick got so sick, and I was nursing him day and night. Who knows, maybe that’s what saved my neck. As it is, it was bad enough. The Dominican rebels had greased the Cuban Minister of Defense to look the other way, naturally, but either he decided what he was doing wasn’t safe, or he got a better offer. On the 6th of August he announced that he’d captured some airplanes and pilots that were to be used against Trujillo. This meant I was in trouble. Jose Luis Herrera called me, told me to get out that day. Rene packed a bag for me and my chauffer got me to the airport just in time to get the afternoon plane to New York. I mean, just in time. The plane was ready to go. But I got out.”

“And why would you have been in danger from the Cuban authorities?”

Embarrassed: “Because they’d find my checks.”

His attorney delayed for a beat, merely for effect. “Mr. Hemingway, do I understand you to say that you were giving a revolutionary group financial support in the form of signed checks?”

“Look, you don’t have to tell me how reckless that was. All I could say is, it’s a lot more obviously stupid after the fact than it seemed at the time.”

“So you left in a hurry. Did you later decide that perhaps this was an overreaction?”

“Not at all. They named me in the newspapers. But I was safely out of the country, and I spent the winter in Idaho. I didn’t go back until February, 1948, when it had all blown over. But that’s the kind of year 1947 was.”

“Let me ask, how did it happen that you went from famous author to covert participant in revolutionary activities?”

“You could say it started in 1918, those months in the hospital listening to wounded veterans talking among themselves. It taught me that the hell that war is can’t be justified even by the brave things, even the splendid things, that men may do in war. When you’re in a war, you have to win it, but when you win, you have to ask what you bought with what you paid. It was clear to me that the World War made political violence into the defining element of our time. That’s why I called my book of violent sketches in our time.”

“All right. But I don’t quite see how this led you to sympathize with revolutionary politics.”

“You don’t? World War I bitched the world, and brought us communism and then fascism. How could you enlist in either side? Yet, how could you stay on the sidelines? From the first time I saw Mussolini, I knew him for what he was, and I said so in print. And even after I got rich, my sympathies were with the poor, never on the side of the rich or of the forces of reaction.”

“So you were willing to risk being used by Stalin?”

“It got hard. In the Spanish Civil War, the republic had nobody else on its side. How could you criticize  Russia in those circumstances? It seemed like treason to the republic. But to support the Soviet government after the war, you’d have to have a stronger stomach than I did.”

“So after the war, you were tempted to dabble in revolutions.”

Angrily: “You think World War II was a happy ending to anything? Maybe if you get involved with revolutions you can’t keep your hands entirely clean, but maybe sitting by and doing nothing isn’t so clean either. Let’s say my politics was revolutionary but cautious. It was always a question, when a chance came up, whether to play it to win, or risk a few bucks on a longshot, or shake your head at and wait for another day. Mostly I stayed on the sidelines, waiting.”

“So the perpetual party at Hemingway’s was cover for your other activities?”

“People don’t do things for just one reason usually. But if you have a place owned by a celebrity and he holds parties all the time, it’s easy for people to meet there while holding drinks.”

“So, later, Batista’s police weren’t so far wrong in suspecting you of helping their enemies.”

“Hell no they weren’t wrong, and the nice thing is, they knew they weren’t wrong, but they couldn’t do anything much about it, because I was too famous, and it would have hurt them. And I lived with this background tension for years. But it did cost me where it hurt – in my reputation. If people had known what I tried to do, it would have showed them where my heart was.”

“Thank you, that’s very clear. The prosecution calls Aaron Hotchner.”

.6.

He half-listened to Hotch promising to tell the truth. He ought to be in his early forties, sort of middle aged, but apparently he had decided to look 28, the way he did when they first met.

“Mr. Hotchner, please describe for the court when, where, why and how you met the defendant.”

“In 1948, I was working for Cosmopolitan magazine, and they sent me to Havana to persuade Ernest Hemingway to write an article on `The Future of Literature’! I needed that job, but, you know, Hemingway had been my hero ever since college, and I couldn’t imagine myself calling him up out of the blue with such a stupid request. I spent a couple of days hiding in my hotel, then I said to hell with it, and if it costs me my job, all right. I wrote him a note and asked him to provide me with a written refusal so maybe I wouldn’t get fired. To my amazement, he calls me up and invites me to have a drink with him at the Floridita! Which, naturally, I jump at, and we spent the evening with him asking me questions and telling me stories and getting me drunk on papa dobles.”

“Seeing if you would pass inspection?”

“That was my guess, and evidently I passed, because he invited me to go out on his boat next day, and he started right in teaching me deep-sea fishing, and that was the beginning of a friendship that lasted more than a dozen years.”

“Would you describe the defendant as a true and loyal friend?”

“Absolutely. The best. Never had a better friend in my life.”

“The defendant was famous for having close friendships and then ending them on some pretext or other. Why do you think that was?”

“When I was in law school. I believe they called that hearsay.”

“Then let me ask a somewhat different question. Do you feel that your own friendship with him was following that pattern?”

“Not at all. We were friends from the time we met.”

“Even in 1960 and 1961?”

“That’s not a fair comparison. These past couple of years, his illness prevented him from seeing anybody clearly.” Speaking directly to him, instead of to the prosecutor: “It’s good to see you your old self, Papa. The past couple of years were pretty terrible.”

“Yeah, I’m getting that. Paranoia is hard to see when you’re on the inside of it.” Saying that, he felt a sudden blast of unscripted emotion, as Hotch let go of the burden he had carried so long. Pain, sorrow, guilt, indecision, helplessness, loss. Anguish, there was no softer word for it.

The prosecutor allowed him to experience the depth of his friend’s emotion. “Mr. Hotchner, I for one wish it were possible for you to remember these proceedings in your waking hours in the physical world.”

“It would make life a lot easier, I’m tell you that!”

“At least, you can feel the defendant’s present comprehension of the effect his illness had on others. And that is the point of this procedure.”

Hotchner shrugged non-existent shoulders. “Well, I’m here as a character witness, if one is needed.”

“It appears that you became a sort of adopted younger brother.”

“Remember, I was old enough that I had done things. I had been an officer in the war; I had begun a career as a writer. So I wasn’t just a wide-eyed kid with nothing to offer.”

“Then tell the court the nature of your relationship.”

“Well, for one thing, we had a lot of fun together. Surely people have told you that Papa loved doing things, and loved doing them with somebody. He loved having good times, and he planned and worked to make them happen, and good times always involved other people. Sometimes it would be a mob, and if need be he would settle for a mob of one. And he was a born teacher, and he liked nothing more than having someone eager and able to learn what he knew.”

“So, not just a wide-eyed kid but a sidekick. A court jester?”

“Listen, mister, I paid my way. I acted as intermediary with my editors, and later I made quite a bit of money for him, adapting his stories for television.”

“Made the money for the defendant, or for yourself?”

“For both of us. Whatever I negotiated, we split down the middle.”

“Did he regard this as a fair division?”

“Of course I did! They were my stories, but it was Hotch that picked them out, and adapted them, and got them produced. For me, it was found money and it kept my name out there.”

“Mr. Hotchner, when you first knew the defendant, did he exhibit signs of mental illness?”

Cautiously: “No more than any of us do, I’d say. We all get into bad moods. We all have bad days and good days. I know what you’re asking about, and for any time prior to the two airplane crashes in Africa in 1954, I would say no.”

“Very well. No further questions. We recall the defendant.”

.7.

“Mr. Hemingway, in 1948 you and your wife set out to spend several months in Europe. Would you describe that trip for the court?”

“In other words, you want me to talk about Adriana.”

“We would like you to tell the court the reasons behind your behavior at that time.”

He squirmed, just a bit. “It’s a pattern, clear enough from here. That doesn’t mean I was aware of it when I was still in the body.”

“Doesn’t it, Mr. Hemingway?”

“Well, not quite aware, or not entirely aware. There’s two things going on, and they’re all mixed together. One is my temper, and the other is my fantasy life. If you give me a chance, I think I can make you see it the way I do.”

“Do proceed.”

“Take my temper. We are talking here of sitting on a volcano. You don’t know what you’re going to do ahead of time – I mean, it isn’t like you’re planning to lose your temper. Sometimes after a particularly violent attack you feel sick. Drained, shaking, and a sensation almost like nausea, almost like a headache. In just a few minutes, you spent the energy you might normally have used in a week. It flowed through you so hot and so fast that sometimes it really did need physical release or it felt like your body would explode. That’s when the physical danger would arise. You could kill somebody, easily, if the fit was still on you and a weapon was at hand. A chair, your fists, a gun, anything. But who ever wanted to make himself sick, and maybe do damage he’d feel guilty about, and maybe kill somebody? I’m talking here about being so fighting mad that you lose sight of limits, or if you keep yourself within limits, it’s just barely. And others are criticizing you for not having enough self-control. They’re controlling a ten horsepower engine and you’re controlling a ten-horse team, and they figure if they can do it, you can do it.”

“But do you not agree that in life individuals need self-control?”

“Sure, but the normal everyday you is not the same as the rage-machine. You try to keep it from going hog-wild, and you pick up the pieces afterward. But you and it aren’t the same thing.”

“Doesn’t this amount to trying to evade responsibility for your own lack of self-control?”

“Looking at it that way is comfortable, isn’t it? It puts distance between you and behavior you disapprove of. Hell, who doesn’t disapprove of behavior like that? Who isn’t ashamed of it? But what if I wasn’t in control of it? What if I, who wouldn’t ever do something like that, am being held responsible because it was done with my body? And what about the fact that when I muscle myself back into control, or at least when the rage-machine lets me back in, then I have to live with the consequences and I don’t even know what happened? People say, `You have to take responsibility for your own actions.’ But if you were an officer commanding a company of men, and one of the men fucked up, yes, it would be your responsibility, but nobody in his right mind would treat you as though you had done it personally. You have the responsibility to prevent it, or, if it happened, to clean up after it, but you yourself didn’t do it, and treating you as if you did would just muddy the waters. You wind up trying to defend yourself not for failing to prevent something, but for doing the something. That doesn’t help you keep the rage-machine under control. In fact, it makes it harder.”

“All right, you said temper and fantasy. Shall we move on to fantasy?”

“You know I was a story-teller. That’s what I was, not just what I did. My whole life, I was making it up and rewriting it as I went along. so sometimes when I was among pretty girls, I was imagining I was young again, and single.”

“And at such times, your actual wife ceased to exist for you. You couldn’t hear her, you couldn’t see her, and then you regarded her as one of the servants. You insulted her verbally, then sometimes you went beyond that, making it clear that you wished she didn’t exist.”

A flash of the old familiar irritation. “I am trying to explain something, here. Yes, that’s how it would affect me sometimes. But Mary could never seem to see that it didn’t have anything to do with her as a person, it was that having a wife didn’t fit in with the scenarios in my mind. I was being a carefree boy again, and she was being my ball and chain.”

“However, look at the position this put her in. She didn’t cease to exist just because you were pretending you were young and unattached.”

It was hopeless, even here where people could read each other’s thoughts.

“Not hopeless, Mr. Hemingway. Don’t give up just because things are difficult. You are not responsible for making things clear to anyone but yourself – but you are responsible for doing that.”

He let it well up. “Okay, I am aware that I treated her badly when she wasn’t fitting in the pretend-life I was enjoying. Pauline, same thing. I remember one time telling Ingrid Bergman I had written Pilar with her in mind, and Pauline butted in and said I had told her I’d had her in mind. You see? It was interfering with the stories I was telling myself. I was retelling my life the way it might have been.”

“Like your stories about your service in the Italian army in World War I.”

“Same thing, yes. But Mary never understood that, and neither did Pauline.”

“Nor Martha Gellhorn, apparently.”

He snorted. “Marty! She didn’t believe the stories I told that were true, let alone the ones I was making up! But that’s another subject altogether.”

“Well, the topic of story telling is a natural segue to a discussion of Hemingway as artist.”

“You won’t hear any objections from me!”

 

“You had contracted to write about the RAF, and you did make some flights with them. Did you enjoy the experience?”

“Very much. Those were great boys, young like the way I was in 1918. Also, for some reason my headache would go away as long as we were in the air, and that was a relief. And being in the air gave me an unfamiliar perspective, plus something could happen at any moment.”

“But you didn’t spend much time in the air.”

“No, writing up the RAF was just me paying for my ride over. Collier’s was paying me to be at the front lines. On D-Day I went across the channel on a troop transport and transferred to a landing ship and went in with the seventh wave, at 7 a.m., but they brought me out again on the same ship. That was not the day for non-essential personnel to be on the ground.”

“When it came time for you to decide what unit to attach yourself to, you considered George Patton’s armored divisions.”

“I did, but with armor, everything was dust, and my throat couldn’t take it. I found my home in the infantry, with Buck Lanham’s regiment.”

“Your honor, I should like to call Gen. Charles T. Lanham and question him and the defendant together.”

“Without objection, proceed.”

.2.

And there was Buck, a general now, but in the colonel’s uniform he had been wearing during that long fall and winter. “It’s so good to see you looking like this, Ernest, very good to know you’re all right. Any chance I will remember this, back in the body?

The judge: “I’m afraid not, Colonel. I’m sorry.”

“Well, I wish I could.” He smiled. “So. Ernest, you were quite a handsome young man, weren’t you? Or are you embellishing?”

“Huh? Oh, you mean, am I improving this body? No, this is what I looked like when I was in my thirties. Or actually, I guess it’s what I would have looked like if I hadn’t gotten blown up in Italy.”

A dry chuckle. “Just like life, then. Always telling the truth, but always improving on the facts.”

He laughed. “I suppose so.”

“Col. Lanham, would you tell the court who and what you were in 1944?”

“I was career army, out of West Point, and in 1944 I was in command of the 22^nd regiment, 4th infantry, under Tubby Barton.”

He grinned at him. “Just that, huh? Mr. Prosecutor, you should know, among other things, his unit was the first to break through the Siegfried Line, he survived Hurtgen Forest, and he led a breakout in the Battle of the Bulge. He was also my model for Colonel Cantwell, and he was the man I described, in print, as the finest and bravest and most intelligent military commander I have known.”

“Yes, well, maybe you didn’t know all that many military commanders. But thanks.”

“Hurtgen Forest won you the Distinguished Service Cross.”

“A lot of brave men won that for me,” Lanham said softly. “A lot of men who died there.”

“Col. Lanham, many people have said the defendant was just playing soldier, that he didn’t really know anything about warfare. Would you please give this court your impression of the defendant’s military knowledge?”

“I had heard of Hemingway the writer, naturally, so I watched him pretty close, to see what he really was. I saw right away that he could read a map, and visualize terrain, and he understood the briefing I gave him. He asked good questions, quietly and appropriately. As time went on, it became clear that he could size up a tactical situation, and he knew our weapons and the enemy’s weapons as well as any of us.”

“Would you describe the man as you observed him?”

“He was as brave a man as I ever saw, and I saw a lot of brave men. He was a born leader, and I was glad to have him there. He seemed to be absolutely fearless, sometimes in situations where a little fear would have been a good idea.” He smiled a tight reminiscent smile. “One night a group of us were in a house eating supper, and they started shelling. A shell came through one wall and went out the opposite wall. Everybody hit the deck, but I looked up and there he was, still sitting at the table, picking splinters out of his food, and he point-blank refused to take cover or even to put on his helmet. He said it can’t kill you unless it has your number on it, some nonsense like that.” A pause. “He also had this spooky ability to know when people were going to die sometimes. One time, he had been with me while I was talking to one of my officers, and as we were walking away I said I was going to have to relieve him, but Ernest said I wouldn’t have to, because he was going to get killed. And he got killed minutes later. When I asked Ernest how he had known, he said the man had smelled of death. And that wasn’t the only time that happened.”

“Colonel, why do you think the defendant’s reputation came to differ so widely from the man you observed at close hand?”

“Simple. He was always shooting himself in the ass with his crazy stories, like how he killed hundreds of Germans, or how he knew the whole German order of battle, or how he’d made his living as a professional prize-fighter. He could really pull you into his stories, and people started not believing anything he said. It’s too bad.”

“I was just being a story-teller, Buck. That’s what I was.”

“Colonel, would you have wanted him as an officer?”

“I’d have been glad to have had him.”

.3.

“Mr. Hemingway, please tell this court what happened in August, 1944, on the army’s road to Paris. Bear in mind, the intent is not to point a finger or to ask for a mea culpa, but to assist you to accurately assess your own motivations, judgments, and actions.”

Slowly, choosing his words: “That big storm in July that wrecked our mulberry harbors meant that we got fewer supplies and reinforcements than was planned. And hedgerow fighting was murder; it was perfect defensive terrain, and the Germans knew how to use it. But once we broke out into open country at the end of July, suddenly we had all the advantages. We had command of the air, which is everything. We had informants and guides everywhere, and they had nobody they could trust. From the breakout to the German border, the krauts were the fox and we were the hounds.”

“It became a chase.”

“It became a chase. But you can chase well or you can chase badly, and the difference determines how many of your boys you get killed.”

“And you viewed this as your opportunity to participate, rather than remaining on the sidelines.”

“Listen, you say you want my own judgment, here it is. I knew France and Frenchmen and Paris and the country around Paris. Frenchmen trusted me, because they knew me by name and reputation. All the French partisans knew which side I had been on. And I had the skills. I could read terrain as well as any officer, and the Crook Factory had given me recent experience in running a group of intelligence agents and evaluating their reports. In mid-August, while I was spending the night at Mont St. Michel, I met an OSS officer and told him what I could do, and I wound up acting as an unofficial liaison officer between the army and the Free French underground. I sent men here and there and they reported to me on where the Germans were setting mines, and which roads they were covering and which ones were open, and I told the army what I learned, as fast as I could put it together. I worked with the OSS and with Army intelligence both, and specifically I helped my old friend David Bruce from the OSS to defend Rambouillet, and I helped him interrogate prisoners. And since you know I can’t lie here, you tell me. Was I posing? Was I pretending? Or was I doing what I could?”

“Mr. Hemingway, you say the OSS officer sanctioned your activities?”

“That’s right.”

“Even though they contravened the Geneva Convention?”

A look of disgust. “This was warfare. Real bullets, and real soldiers getting killed. The OSS was like the army, they wanted to get the job done. If they found a way to save American lives and shorten the war, would you have told them they shouldn’t take it?”

“But you admit that what you did was illegal.”

“It also saved lives. And we could have saved more, if they’d used the information I gathered to move into Paris sooner. The extra five days it took to throw the Germans out of Paris cost the lives of 1,500 Free French irregulars and French civilians. None of that was necessary.”

“But the Geneva Convention forbids accredited war correspondents from engaging in combat operations. After some of your fellow correspondents filed a formal complaint about your activities in August, the army convened a formal inquiry, and in October you testified under oath that you had done nothing to violate your status as a war correspondent. You explained away the sworn testimony of your fellow correspondents that you had carried arms, and had kept a huge stash of arms in your hotel room, and had participated in military operations as the de facto chief of a band of French irregulars. Speaking to the court in an environment which makes a lie an impossibility, I put it to you directly. Did you lie to that military court?”

“I did.”

“You did engage in those activities forbidden to war correspondents under the Geneva Convention?”

“I did.”

“Knowing that you were thereby jeopardizing the protection that convention offered to your fellow correspondents?”

“I don’t know how much protection it ever offered them, and I don’t think I actually jeopardized anybody. But I couldn’t tell that court what I had done, and the court didn’t want me to. It was something that needed doing, and the best thing would have been to pass over it in silence. Instead, I had to squirm around like a worm on a hook, flat-out lying sometimes. Everybody in the room knew I was lying and wanted me to lie. I was covering for a lot of people, including Bruce and the OSS.”

“So it was merely theater?”

“The Army knew I had done a good job, but it had to pretend to investigate. And I think the worst of it was that I had to lie about something I was proud of. If I had been able to tell the truth, people might have understood why I had the respect of men like Buck. Anyway, to hell with it. I was exonerated.”

“It hurt.”

“Of course it hurt.”

“Very well, let us examine the day the allied armies liberated Paris. You remember that day well, I would imagine. I believe that day is sometimes known as the day that Hemingway liberated the Ritz.”

A grin. “Yeah.”

“You reached the city with the liberating armies, and found a city hysterical with joy.”

“People in the streets everywhere. People wild, just wild. They had had four years of occupation, and they were blowing it all out of their systems as best they could. Cheering, singing, offering us anything they had to drink, surrounding our vehicles so we could hardly move. Never got kissed so much in my life.”

“Sounds like wonderful material for Collier’s.”

“It would have been, but it was completely indescribable. We all knew we’d never see anything like it.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well one thing, we decided to get inside. Everybody with a weapon was shooting it off in the air, and all those rounds had to come down someplace. Would have been a hell of a thing to survive the Germans and get shot accidentally by somebody in another street, celebrating. So we took off – me and Bruce and Red Pelkey.”

“Pelkey being Private Archie Pelkey, your driver?”

“That’s right. We got onto the Champs Elysees – we were the only car on it – and we liberated the Travelers Club. We were the first ones to get that far, so they opened a bottle and toasted us in champagne, and then we headed out for the Ritz, which was totally empty except for Ausiello, the manager. Since we were the first ones there, we got rooms – and I had them set up fifty martini cocktails for the boys and me.”

“There was a formal surrender ceremony, but you did not cover it.”

“No need. Collier’s hired me as a feature writer, not a news reporter. Plenty of other people would get the story, and the Ritz was more comfortable.”

“You were not concerned that you were missing a bit of history?”

“Nope. That’s the kind of thing Martha wouldn’t dream of missing and I wouldn’t dream of covering.”

“And the victory parade through the city?”

“Not that either. Mary watched it, I found out later. No, I stayed at the hotel, and I ate and drank with whatever friends came by, and I was plenty happy to relax after what we’d just been through. When I went out, it was to revisit places I knew and loved. What did I care about parades and ceremonies? But, if I had known that the reason Paris was still standing was because von Choltitz had defied Hitler’s orders to destroy it, I would have tried to shake his hand for saving the city I loved best in the world.”

“Defense?”

“In context of the liberation of Paris, your honor, the defense would like to call a witness.”

“Without objection, you may proceed.”

“The defense recalls Sylvia Beach.”

.4.

Sylvia looked as she looked that day in 1944, a little underweight, a little drawn.

“May I do the questioning this time?”

“It’s irregular, but go ahead, and we’ll see.”

“Sylvia, would you tell the court where you were in August, 1944, when the Germans were driven out of Paris?”

“In 1944, Adrienne and I were living for the day when our lives would resume. I had had to close my shop and hide the books when the Germans came in.”

“Would you tell the court about the last time we met?”

Her eyes widened. “But of course! It is the very last anecdote I tell in Shakespeare and Company! As you know, Adrienne and I were in Paris for the whole time of the occupation, and it was very hard. At the end, there were still German snipers on the roofs of our street, and we were very tired of it all, and we were trying just to stay alive long enough to see the end. And one day I am in my apartment and I look down and there are several American jeeps, and I hear a voice calling my name. `Sylvia! Sylvia!,` and of course everyone else starts calling `Sylvia,’ and Adrienne says, `It’s Hemingway,’ and I went running downstairs and you were running upstairs and we crashed together and you picked me up and whirled me around and kissed me, and all the people were cheering.”

“Not the Germans, probably.”

“No, not the Germans. You remember? You asked me if Adrienne had collaborated, and when I said she had not, you knew we were in no danger from the resistance, and you asked if there was anything you could do for me, and I asked you to get rid of the German snipers. You got your men out of the jeeps and led them on to the roofs, and that was the last time we heard guns fire on our street. You came down from the roof bloody and dirty, but no worse when you arrived.”

“Yes, and Adrienne offered me a glass of wine and her next-to-last bar of soap.”

“Then you said you were off to liberate the wine cellar at the Ritz, and that was the last time we saw you. I heard that as a war correspondent you should not have been doing those things, but I assure you, you had no critics on the rue de l’Odeon that day.”

“Thank you Sylvia. You were a lovely person, and I loved knowing you.”

“Why, Hemingway, I thought you were prejudiced against lesbians!” They laughed again, and he felt like he had tears in his eyes. Good times. “Was that okay, Mr. Defense Attorney?”

“Yes, well done. No further questions, your honor.”

“Prosecution?”

.5.

“Very well, Mr. Hemingway, you were there on the day the city you loved was freed. You ate, drank and were merry. Then what?”

“I gave myself a few days off, and hung around with the boys , and then a couple of days later, on the first of September, Buck sent me a message: `Go hang yourself, brave Hemingstein. We have fought at Landrecies and you were not there.’ Taking off from Henry V, you know. So I went off to join the division up near the Belgian border. But by the time I got there, the task force was disbanding, and there wasn’t much to see, so I went back to Paris for a short sweet reunion with Mary.”

“And then?”

“And then on the 7^th, Red and I were able to drive east along with two cars and another jeep and a motorcycle; much safer that way. By the time we got back to the regiment, it was already well inside Belgium, chasing Germans and defending against their counter-attacks. This kept up for another week and then we topped a hill and there was Germany ahead.”

“Were you off scouting again?”

“No, I was staying with the unit. My action with the irregulars around Paris was a one-time operation, taking advantage of the fact that I knew the area and could talk to the locals. None of that applied in Belgium, nor when we crossed over into Germany, which we did on the 12th.” A pause. “And I suppose that was the happiest day, and evening, and night of the war.”

“Because the army had reached German soil?”

“No. Because of what followed, how bad it was.”

Another pause, a long one.

“Mr. Hemingway?”

“You know, we go along rummaging through these old memories, and even the things I’m not proud of, the things I bitterly regret, the things that still sting, it hasn’t been as bad as I would have thought. But –.”

Another pause.

“When Buck’s combat team seized the high ground just beyond a village and we halted for the night, I decided to organize a feast. I took over a farmhouse, and got one of the German women to cooking some chickens I shot, and after the nightly staff conference, we ate chicken and peas and carrots and onions and salad and some preserved fruit for dessert. Naturally, we drank everything in sight. Everybody was laughing and drinking and telling stories, and since I was the one who had organized the feast, it was like they were my guests. We were happy that night.”

“And what happened next?”

“What happened next is that the division attacked Hitler’s West wall defenses. They cracked it after heavy casualties, but that first assault was nothing next to what was ahead.” Another pause. “It’s funny, all those years, I thought the feelings hadn’t dulled any, but I guess they must have. I see I hadn’t remembered how it felt fresh, not really.”

“Without a body to be numbed or diverted, you have no way to dull feelings, Mr. Hemingway. That’s one of the reasons for this procedure, to help you deal with them.”

“But I’m as dead now as those boys that got killed. Wouldn’t you think I’d feel differently about them? About the whole fuck-up that put them in the ground?”

“Why should you feel different, just because you are dead? You knew then that sooner or later everybody dies. What’s different now?”

“I don’t know, it just seems like it ought to feel different.”

“Please proceed.”

“You had to know what we were up against. The Germans had had years to plan their defenses, and Germans are always competent, always thorough. The 50 square miles of hill country that 4^th was supposed to clear had been made into a fortress. Mines, mortars, machine guns, heavy artillery, you name it, all sighted and interlocked. Plus the trees and the underbrush were so thick. we couldn’t see, and the upper branches of the trees would shatter incoming shells, sending fragments flying, what we called tree bursts. The weather was lousy, first cold rain, then sleet. The ground was mud. You couldn’t get dry.”

Yet another pause.

“I’ll just give you the numbers. Between November 16 and December 3 Buck’s regiment lost 12 officers and 126 men killed and nearly 1,900 wounded in battle, and 180 men missing, as well as 500 non-battle casualties. That’s an 87% casualty rate, in 13 days. Replacements were getting killed before they even got to the front. The few of us that made it across wondered why we were spared when nearly nine out of ten of us weren’t. I wrote Mary a poem that said `Those of us who know walk very slowly, and we look at one another with infinite love and compassion.’ That’s what it came down to. Endurance, and love, and compassion.”

The prosecutor gave him a moment, then said, “It gave you nightmares.”

“Yes it did, as a matter of fact. For years. I thought, if I get out of this alive, I’m going to try to write it. But I couldn’t, really.”

“You needn’t fear going back into those memories, Mr. Hemingway. As I said earlier, the point is to free you from the need to forget. Please tell the court what you experienced.”

“I’m not going to talk about how I reacted to combat. You want to know, ask Buck, or any of the officers or men.”

“Very well, let’s do that.”

.6.

“Colonel, the defendant has declined to talk about his own participation in the Hurtgen Forest, and asked that you speak for his conduct.”

“I can do that. What do you want to know?”

“You have already testified that he was knowledgeable and competent. My questions now are somewhat less tangible. You said he was brave, and occasionally foolhardy. Would you say he had a death-wish?”

Weighing it: “He was a complicated man, variable.”

“Are you saying he was `mad north northwest’?”

“He wasn’t mad, at all. He was as sane as any of us”

I did not mean that literally, I was quoting Shakespeare –“

“Hamlet, I know, but your question can’t be answered yes or no. Ernest was sane, but it seemed to me that he was caught between a death-wish and an equally powerful fear of death, and sometimes one would gain the upper hand and sometimes the other. Three forces, I suppose, because he told me that he had regained the old sense of invulnerability that he had lost in Italy in 1918.”

“It’s true. In September, I had been having premonitions that I was going to be killed, but suddenly I knew I was going to be all right.”

“Colonel, here, where you needn’t fear legal consequences, I ask you if his actions were those of a correspondent or a soldier.”

“We were in a desperate situation, Mr. Prosecutor, and every man was needed. We couldn’t afford to be too particular about the rules.”

“Even in the face of the inquiry that had investigated just such charges, a few weeks before?”

“I always thought those correspondents filed those charges more because Ernest annoyed them and made them jealous than because they really thought what he did was wrong. But that kind of correspondent wasn’t up in the lines among us.”

“But still, according to the letter of the law—“

“I know, and I’m not saying the Geneva Convention was a bad thing. It was better for all concerned that it be followed, and usually it was. But sometimes, it wasn’t practical. Correspondent status was not going to protect you from a shell burst, or mortar fire, or machine gun fire. Somebody 100 yards away from you is going to see a target, not a protected observer. And if you’re fighting off a counter-attack, do you think the attackers are going to be making fine distinctions? You can’t be safe unless you stay way behind the lines and live off the official handouts. And when the guys under fire are your friends, is that the right time to worry about the Geneva Convention?”

“Colonel, that brings me to perhaps the central question here. What effect on him do you think it had? Not just Hurtgen Forest, but the war?”

Long thought. “I suppose you want a simple answer, but the answer is as complicated as he was, and he was the most complicated man I ever met. He had always had this deep longing to emulate his grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War. Maybe in France in 1944 he finally got his chance to be a soldier. Perhaps it reassured him of his bravery, too. You mightn’t think it – and he never would have admitted it – but he had his doubts about himself.”

“You’re only as good as your last fight, Buck.”

“Right, see, that’s what I mean. And Ernest was always a student. The war in Europe gave him first-hand experience of modern infantry warfare, and he enjoyed learning and storing it up for possible use in a book. And, clearly, he enjoyed living a life with the emotional complications stripped away. It let him run away from his marital problems, for one thing. A lot of men find that.”

A hesitation. “But I think the most profound effect was that he came out of it with combat fatigue. Not that any of us could have come out of Hurtgen Forest without it, but of course he would be more prone to it than most. After the war, I heard about his depressions, and I was witness to a couple of his sudden irrational rages – sorry, Ernest, but you know it’s the truth. Those are common symptoms of combat fatigue.”

“You say `more susceptible than most.’ Why do you say that, colonel?”

“Combat fatigue is more than being tired. It comes from seeing too many boys die, too many terrible wounds, too many sights that soldiers see and never talk about. It’s the result of having experienced too much, for too long, with nothing you can do to forget, and no way to deal with it but to stuff it away as best you can. The most sensitive ones suffer the worst, especially if they tell themselves they’re tough and they can take it. I don’t think Ernest ever got over it, not really.”

“Col. Lanham, you accepted the defendant as a fellow soldier.”

“De facto. Quietly. But yes, absolutely.”

“And as a man?”

“As a man, he was a Godsend. In September, when our attack stalled out for lack of supplies, and division left my regiment practically unprotected for two weeks, he and I sweated it out together. And in November, on the night before Hurtgen Forest, he and I sat up until 3 a.m., telling each other our life’s stories. Only somebody who had been in my position would know what it meant to have somebody like him to talk to. We became brothers, those nights, no matter what happened afterwards.”

“Afterwards?”

“As you no doubt know, Ernest was capable of lashing out against his friends, as much as anyone else. His behavior after the war could be erratic. Such incidents affect friendships, even though you don’t want them to. I knew what he had been through. I’d been there myself. I still valued him as a friend, but I learned to be a little careful, I taught myself to expect a little less.”

“Thank you colonel. Mr. Hemingway, we are finished with the war, except for tying up loose ends.”

“Good.”

.7.

“I note that you returned to the front in December, despite fever and sweating that had put you in the infirmary, to see the culmination of the Battle of the Bulge.”

“Yeah, but that was the last combat action I saw. When it was clear that the Krauts were whipped, I went back to Paris and started thinking about how to get home.”

“You didn’t want to observe the battle for Germany.”

“No. I was glad to be able to leave without having to see any more kids get killed. On March 6^th, I was in the air, hitching a ride home with General Anderson.”

“Did you see Miss Gellhorn before you left?”

“Yeah, in her hotel room for maybe five minutes. She was in bed with the flu. I told her I’d give her a divorce, and I beat it, and that’s the last time we ever saw each other.”

“As you look back, do you regret going to France in 1944?’

He waited for his feelings and thoughts to clarify, waited for the words to come.

“That is a harder question than maybe you know. I value my experiences in France, particularly with Buck Lanham’s outfit, but maybe I paid too high a price.”

“If you had to sum up your experience in the European theater, what would you say?”

“I put it into Across The River And Into The Trees. War can be exciting, but it isn’t glamorous. It had to be done, and we did it, but that didn’t blind us to how dirty it was. I wrote a short story I never got published, that I call `Black Ass at the Crossroads,’ that shows how the men hated what we were doing. It marked you, you couldn’t help being marked by it, and you were glad to be done with it. As soon as you were able to, you flew home to pick up the pieces of your life.”

 

“Mr. Hemingway, after you returned from China and reported, you went on to Cuba instead of remaining in the States. Why?”

“Because if I didn’t spend six months of the year outside the US, taxes were going to eat me alive. I had been gone three months on the China trip, but now I had to stay in Cuba at least until September.” He sighed. “That was a hard year. I would have gotten the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but Nicholas Murray Butler overruled the unanimous decision of the board, so they didn’t give it out at all. I made nearly $140,000 that year, the first year I’d ever made any real money, and they took $90,000 of it in taxes! Sinclair Lewis gave an impromptu speech about me and Scribner’s didn’t send a stenographer to take it down, even though I had asked them to and told them I’d pay for it, so now I’d never know what he said. And Mr. Josie died in a Havana hospital after a minor operation, and he had been like my big brother. Hard year, 1941. Brutal. About the only good thing that happened that fall was Marty’s book of short stories, The Heart of Another. Otherwise, not much to cheer about. And then Pearl Harbor.”

“Although you were in Cuba, you thought up a way to help the war effort.”

“You mean the Crook Factory? No, that was more Spruill Braden’s idea.”

“Mr. Braden, the American Ambassador to Cuba, was a friend of yours.”

“He was. He was an ambassador, but he wasn’t just some political stuffed shirt. He was a literate man, an author. He had done things in the real world. He knew that Havana was full of Franco Spaniards and Nazi sympathizers. We didn’t have any counter-intelligence on the ground, and Braden knew I knew all kinds of people: celebrities, sportsmen, diplomats, government functionaries, reporters, headwaiters, whores, the rich I partied with and the raggedy-ass kids in the neighborhood and the people I used to give fish meat to when I came in from a good day fishing. He asked me to put it together as an intelligence network, and I did, at the same time I was putting together Men At War, a 1,000-page anthology of war writing. I called it the Crook Factory. The operation only lasted a few months, just long enough to fill the gap before the Gestapo came in. The FBI, I mean.”

The prosecutor smiled. “Then you persuaded the ambassador to let you refit the Pilar to go looking for submarines to attack.”

“That isn’t quite what happened. In 1942, U-Boats are sinking ships all up and down our Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, and the Navy doesn’t have enough ships to patrol with, due to the usual government stupidity. We’ve been attacking U-boats in the North Atlantic all during 1941, but nobody made plans to deal with the absolutely predictable retaliation. So now they need boats, and the only way they can get them is for civilians to volunteer their boats as auxiliaries. I don’t know how many boats the Navy enlisted, but I imagine it was a lot.”

“It was, Mr. Hemingway. Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, more than 2,000 boats.”

“Well, I knew it had to be a lot. But we’re in Cuba, so we have to do things quietly. Batista’s government knew about our operation, but it had to pretend not to know. Cuban nationalistic sensibilities, you understand.” He let his face show just the shadow of his perpetual disgust with hypocrisy.

“They wanted us to use the Pilar as a Q-Boat along Cuba’s northern coast, to search various uninhabited keys for hidden submarine supply dumps, and to patrol certain waters while prepared to report U-Boat sightings. That was a valid mission, but I thought, `Okay, let’s carry the idea a little farther.’ We knew that sometimes subs would sometimes stop small boats to get fresh food. We’d look like an easy target to a sub. What if we were ready to run up to it and throw a bomb into the conning tower, maybe do enough damage to prevent it from submerging?”

“And the Navy went along with the scheme.”

“A few civilians putting themselves at risk wouldn’t cost them anything. They supplied us with ammo, and radio gear, and a Navy man to work the radio, and we took her out for a shakedown cruise in November 1942, supposedly engaging in scientific research into fish populations.” He snorted, remembering. “As if anybody was going to believe that, in wartime! “

“So you went cruising, looking for trouble.”

“We did. We were out from January through March 1943, and again from May to July, which turned out to be our longest, hardest cruise. After we came in, our redeployment kept getting delayed – not our fault – and we didn’t get out again until November, and that one didn’t amount to much. We went out one last time in January, 1944, and by then it was clear that we weren’t needed on the north coast anymore.”

“If you ever were.”

Ignoring her: “I volunteered us to patrol in the Caribbean, working out of Guantanamo, but we weren’t needed there either, because the U-Boats were finished.”

“Now, Miss Gellhorn, you have said that the defendant’s Q-boat operations were just an excuse to go fishing using government gasoline. Is that still your opinion?”

“All I can tell you is what I observed. There was Ernest surrounded by his fishing buddies, fortified by the usual wall of hard liquor, and the time I went out with them he brought his young sons, and they were taking potshots at junk in the water, claiming it was target practice. Does that sound like real war to you, or does it sound like pretense?”

“Often wrong, never in doubt.”

She turned on him, a familiar movement. “Oh sure, the usual. I saw but didn’t understand.”

“Marty, it’s all on the record. You think it was a year of partying because you don’t have the slightest idea of what it involved. You think the Navy gave us ammunition and installed communications gear and made arrangements for our refueling and re-provisioning, because they wanted to help me go fishing? You think the boats doing the same job in American coastal waters were just using government gasoline to go fishing?”

“I don’t know what the others were doing. I only know what I saw with my own eyes.”

“You know what you think you saw. You didn’t see the context. You don’t have any idea what it’s like, that many men on a small boat, six weeks at a time.” He could feel himself having to make the attempt to be reasonable, just like the old days. “Listen, instead of criticizing an operation you didn’t understand, why not go to the people who knew, and ask them?”

“No thanks. I can find other things to report on.”

He turned to the prosecutor. “The trouble with Marty is that she could never tell the difference between the way things looked and the way they really were. To use Pilar as a Q-Boat, we had to have cover. We made it look like a scientific expedition, but if people thought we were just conning the government so we could go fishing, that was all the better. The boys and I had our fun as we went along, but it was still a lot of men on a small boat for a long time. And we were ready to make an attempt on a submarine, if circumstances had allowed. It didn’t happen, but it could have happened. One time, a sub surfaced just where we should have been patrolling, but they had called us in to Havana for consultations. And the only time we did see a sub surface, it went off in the opposite direction, and it was doing 12 knots and we couldn’t catch it.”

“Which perhaps saved all your lives.”

“Perhaps. But suppose it had worked! It would have been something to remember all your life, if you happened to survive it. You could ask Wolfie.”

“Wolfie?”

“Winston Guest. Ask him.”

“That sounds like a good idea. Without objection from the defense, I think we should call Mr. Guest.”

“No objection, your honor. The defense looks forward his testimony.”

.2.

Wolfie looked like he had during all those days on Pilar. “It’s very good to see you looking young and healthy, Papa,” he said. “I don’t know that I would have expected it.”

“Wolfie, Marty still tells people we were just out there having a good time on government gasoline. You want to say something about that?”

“Papa, I liked you and the rest of the boys, but eight men in a small boat for six weeks at a time is not my idea of a pleasure cruise. Neither is getting eaten alive by mosquitoes while we were searching up and down Romano Key looking for fuel dumps. And the hours we spent scanning for periscopes! I thought I’d go blind sometimes.”

“Mr. Guest, this court knows your background, including the fact that you were born rich, you were a graduate of Columbia Law School, and at 36, were considered too old for military service. We wish to ask you about the submarine patrols. Did you think the defendant’s plan could succeed?”

“We knew the specs, so we knew the odds. And the only time we did see a submarine, when that thing surfaced, I thought, `They call that a boat? It’s an aircraft carrier! ‘Chances were, we were going to get killed before we could get into range. Probably a good thing we never caught one.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m dead anyway, and what a thing if we’d been able to do it! If they’d had to scuttle the thing, or if we could keep them topside, and the Navy could get there soon enough, a 38-foot converted civilian yacht would have put a U-Boat out of commission. Or, maybe we could capture the whole crew. Maybe we would have gotten code books, a lot of things.”

Wolfie was watching him brighten with remembered enthusiasm, and he laughed, partly just from the joy that had always come with being around him. “And you knew as well as anybody did how bad the odds were.”

“Well, yeah, but it was worth taking that chance, if we could.”

“I said it was all right with me, didn’t I?”

“You sure did, and I never forgot it, you standing there with me on the flying bridge, the muscles jumping in your cheeks, saying, `Papa it’s all right with me. Don’t worry for a moment Papa it’s all right with me.’ But the point is, we weren’t just fooling around out there.”

“No. We burned a lot of government gas, but they got their money’s worth.”

“I was going to write about you, Wolfie. Did write about you, and the others, but I couldn’t get it into publishable shape. I wish I could have, you all deserved that.”

“Cross examination?”

“Can’t think of anything we could add, Mr. Prosecutor.”

.3.

“Mr. Hemingway, it sounds like you and your friends expected to die in that boat.”

“You go attack a submarine in a 38-foot boat and tell me if you expect to survive. But the war gods smiled on us, and we couldn’t catch the only son of a bitch we sighted, so we lived.”

“All very dramatic, Ernest, and there you are as usual, casting yourself in another heroic pose.”

“And there you are as usual, disparaging what you don’t understand. If we had bagged a sub, you would have said, `Oh, did the submarine interrupt the fishing?’”

“Mr. Hemingway, if you expected to die engaging the sub – why engage it? What good would it do to be killed when you couldn’t do it any harm?”

“We had our plans and here was the chance. What should we have done? Play possum? Run? Would you want to live with that memory for the rest of your life? And – maybe it would’ve worked!”

“I see. Yet your Q-Boat experience did not lead you to want to participate in the war in Europe.”

“I would have been happy to participate in Europe, but being a correspondent wasn’t participating, it was being in the audience. I could have been of great use to the OSS, but they turned me down.”

“Miss Gellhorn, in retrospect, would you still urge the defendant to report the war in Europe rather than remain in Cuba?”

“In retrospect I should have left him to play on his boat, but in 1942 and 1943 I still thought, if he got close enough to the war, later on he could do for it what he had done for the Spanish war. You see, until I saw him in Europe, I still believed he was the man I knew in Spain.”

“Even while we were still in Cuba, she had washed her hands of me, but she didn’t quite know it. And I was about finished with her, too, and I was a lot closer to knowing it than she was.”

“I’m afraid we need to talk about that last year together in Cuba.”

“Yes, Ernest, we can talk about our own little war.”

“Miss Gellhorn…”

“Hell, she’s right, that’s about what it amounted to.”

“Mr. Hemingway, when you and your wife were away from each other, you each expressed great love and tenderness, and then your coming together again drew sparks. How would you explain that?”

“I don’t know, it just kept happening.”

“Miss Gellhorn?”

“Maybe distance brought out the best in us.”

“Now what kind of sense would that make?”

“Well, Ernest, I don’t know. But whenever I left you, the things I loved about you got bigger, and as soon as we were together again, all I could see were the things I couldn’t stand. And then at the end, your behavior toward me was intolerable. No one should have to put up with people screaming at them, and insulting them in public.”

“How about the fact that it made you feel guilty, being safe and comfortable while a war was going on?”

“How about your going so long between baths and clean clothes?”

“How about your hating having to keep up any household routine?”

“How about your making it impossible to have a household routine? Living with you was living with chaos!”

“And living with you was like living with a record player, always playing the same tune.”

“What tune? That there’s a war on? That you ought to be pulling your weight and doing the one thing you could do better than anybody else in the world instead of playing war?”

“Why did you always think you knew what was best for me?”

“Because I could see what was happening to you, and you couldn’t! Because I respected the craftsman and I admired the writer and I remembered the man who had cared about the Spanish people, and instead of the man I knew, you were becoming `papa.’ Plus, you were drinking like a fish, and that always meant you were under pressure.”

“Yes I was! Living with you!”

“Not living with me, living with yourself! You knew you were wasting your life and you were working hard not to know it, so you drank.”

“Maybe that wasn’t the source of the pressure, did you ever think of that? I was doing what I could for the war effort, no matter what you thought, but I was hearing the clock ticking, and wondering if I would ever get back to my real work after the war was over. And I was sick of living with someone who was so cocksure about her own opinions about anything and everything.”

“That was another thing, wasn’t it? You were losing your ability to hear anybody say anything you disagreed with. Why do you think you couldn’t keep your friends? Dos Passos, MacLeish, you know the list – men of ability and integrity, and you and they had been comrades in arms, so to speak. But they all had one great fault, they wouldn’t become your disciples.”

“We’re not talking about other people, we’re talking about living with you and your illusions. You couldn’t just see things as they were; you had to see them as they ought to be. Roosevelt had to be God, and the New Deal the new dispensation, and World War II a glorious crusade to free mankind and bring in the millennium.”

“And you had to see everything in light of how it would affect Ernest Hemingway. Every month, you seemed to become more superficial.” To the prosecutor: “We’d go into Havana and he’d drink, and as soon as he was surrounded with admirers, he’d start on these self-aggrandizing stories, and the thing I could never figure out was why. He was Ernest Hemingway, for God’s sake! Why couldn’t that be enough? Why did he have to make himself into a war hero and a professional prize fighter and God knows what else?”

“You never could tell the difference between lying and story-telling.”

“You’d tell these stupid lies to the point that your friends – our friends – were embarrassed. And what did it mean to me, to be married to a liar?”

“It meant you had an excuse to try to tear me down, with your sarcasms and your lectures and your warnings that you were losing respect for me.”

“And that meant you had an excuse for raging at me like a crazy man whenever you got drunk enough, like the night you slapped me in the car when I was driving us home.”

“You were a model of self control yourself, as I remember. You deliberately drove my Lincoln into a tree.”

“What was I supposed to do, give you the idea it was okay to hit me? If I hadn’t given as good as I got, you would have walked all over me.”

“You know what I think? I think you secretly liked us fighting. I think if we had been poor, you would have liked me better.”

“If we’d been poor, at least you would have had to be more you, instead of having to be `papa.’”

“All right, both of you. I will take that as an adequate explanation of why you fought when you were together. But whenever you were apart, other feelings surfaced. Miss Gellhorn’s reasons for her reactions are her own business, but Mr. Hemingway, when she was away, what was going on with you? It is your reactions we are trying to understand.”

“I got lonely”

“For Martha specifically, for just to have a woman in your bed?”

“I answered your question. That’s all I feel like saying.”

“Your honor, may I ask a few questions of Miss Gellhorn?”

“Proceed, counselor.”

“Miss Gellhorn, you spent some weeks in the Caribbean in the summer of 1943, investigating conditions, gathering material for an article for Collier’s magazine.”

“That’s right, and Ernest objected strenuously, even though I needed to earn the money to pay my share of our expenses.”

“And, just in case you think we were rolling in dough, I was in the 80% tax bracket, and my 1941 tax bill was $103,000. I made a lot, but I didn’t get to keep much of it.”

“And after a few weeks at home, Miss Gellhorn, you went on to Europe, did you not?”

I did. I went up to New York in September, and it took nearly a month to get my papers, but I did get over to England, and then I got to see the war in Italy.”

“While you were in Europe, your novel Liana was published. Did it do well?”

“Max Perkins thought it would be chosen as a Book of the Month Club selection, and he was quite embarrassed when it wasn’t. Still, over time it did become a best seller.”

“The defendant had helped you with that book, had he not, while he was out on patrol in his boat?”

“I would read successive installments at night while we were on patrol, and pencil in my suggestions, and get it back to her next time we made port.”

“I never said he wasn’t a good editor. Maybe the thing we had most in common, by that point, was writing.”

“Thank you, Miss Gellhorn. No further questions.”

.5.

“Well, let’s follow up on that line of inquiry, Miss Gellhorn. You returned from Europe in March, 1944. What sort of reaction did you meet?”

“It was Ernest at his murderous worst, storming at me day and night. I was desperately tired but he was not letting me sleep, with his accusations and his tirades. He was more like a crazy man than the man I had used to know.”

“Did you think about leaving him?”

“There wasn’t any time for that. The invasion was coming, everybody knew that, and I had to be there. Only, fool that I was, I still wanted him there too. I couldn’t help thinking, if he just gets where he obviously belongs, he’ll find himself again.”

“Meanwhile, Mr. Hemingway, you had made up your mind to go.”

“Yeah, I didn’t like it, but I guess Marty finally wore me down. Up until May, I still had hopes of doing something active. Marty and I were already in New York, getting our papers to get across, when I learned that the OSS had turned me down. I gather they concluded I wouldn’t work well in harness.”

“No kidding. How in the world would they get an idea like that?”

“For somebody who lived with me for all those years, you’re amazingly consistent in failing to understand me. All the time Pilar was operating as a Q-Boat, we were under orders, or didn’t that ever occur to you? We didn’t just go where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go. They told us what to do and we did it.”

“But in any case, the OSS option was closed to you.”

“It was, and it’s the kind of work I should have been doing. Anybody could be a reporter; they had hundreds of ’em. How many people knew what I knew, and who I knew, in France? In fact, it’s just the kind of work I did do that summer on the way from Normandy to Paris.”

“We’ll get to that. First, let’s talk about how you got to England.”

“I flew. The Brits flew me over, in return for my promise to write about the RAF.”

“Which came about because I talked to Roald Dahl, a British assistant air attaché. Ernest forgets to mention that.”

“All right, it’s true, you talked to Dahl, and he got me a seat.”

“Also he forgets to mention that in New York, he signed up to report on the invasion for Collier’s, even though I had been writing for Collier’s for years, which automatically meant that I couldn’t, because magazines were limited to one correspondent each.”

“Mr. Prosecutor, she has it in her head that I stopped her from being their front-line correspondent. But the War Department had ruled that female correspondents couldn’t go any further than women’s services went, which meant they couldn’t go to the front. She knows that.”

“He forgets to mention that he refused to try to get a seat for me on the airplane he got to ride in because of me, and I wound up as the only passenger on a ship that was carrying dynamite.”

Silence.

“Mr. Hemingway?”

“Maybe I wasn’t anxious to cross the Atlantic hearing about my duty all the way.”

“Mr. Hemingway?”

“All right, it was spite, I admit it.”

“Mr. Hemingway, another opportunity. Find the complex of reasons and look at them.”

Apparently this was going to go on forever. He sighed and dredged, and came out sighing some more.

“It was a lot of things. I really didn’t want to be doing this. Either I wanted a position of responsibility, or I wanted to be left alone, and I wasn’t getting either. The OSS turned me down, and Collier’s didn’t really need me, they just wanted my name. And I was tired. A year at sea was like a year of warfare anywhere. It wears you down. The physical hardships, the uncertainty, the responsibility, it all takes its toll. And I went there already feeling the losses – the loss of time, the loss of energy, the loss of whatever I might have written. None of that was going to be recoverable. Also, I guess I blamed Marty for spending so much of the past year chasing moonbeams: I think I was feeling, she was spending time and energy that really should have been spent with me.”

“You mean on you.”

“Well, all right, on me. Why was I less important than everything else? By the time we got up to New York, part of me hated you, and that part was growing.”

“So you took it out on me.”

Grudgingly: “Maybe I did. But Marty, it was China all over again. Who wanted to go to the war in Europe?”

“At least I didn’t have to hear that every few days.”

“No, because by the time you got to England, we were finished.”

“Not on my part, not quite. When I arrived, I was leaning that way, but I was still undecided. It was only after seeing you in that hospital room that I knew.”

“Mr. Hemingway, Let’s talk about that.”

“I had been in London about a week. It was clear to everybody, we were days away from invading France. Everything was eat, drink and be merry. A party at Capa’s broke up at about 3 a.m., and Pete Gorer offered to drive me back to the Dorchester. Blackout conditions, of course, and he’d been drinking like everybody else. We hit a steel water tank that was in the road, and I got smacked into the windshield. I had a scalp wound pouring blood, and both knees were swelling up from hitting the dashboard, but the really serious thing was that I had another concussion. They got me to St. George’s Hospital – 57 stitches – and sent me to recuperate at the London Clinic. This was early morning, May 25^th.”

“And I got to England two days later, and as soon as I get off the boat, people are asking me about Ernest’s accident. He’s in the London Clinic, and he’s supposed to be in terrible shape after a car wreck. So I go up to see him, and he’s turned the room into a goddamned cocktail party. He’s wearing a bandage like a turban and he’s drinking, and he has surrounded himself with cronies and celebrity-gazers, and I knew right away we were through.”

“She was livid. She disapproved of the fact that I had been out partying in wartime, that I was drinking in the clinic, that I was having a good time there with my friends. She figured that I didn’t really have a concussion, and the bandages were just window dressing – but if I was hurt, it was my own fault. Terrific amount of sympathy I got from my wife.”

Drily: “Under the circumstances, did you expect her to have any sympathy for you?”

Sheepishly: “You mean because of the ammunition ship? Maybe not. But it didn’t matter, we were through. Looking back, I think she and I had a long shipboard romance. Marty was a writer, she was passionately anti-fascist, and she was young and beautiful. She admired my work, which made us both think she admired me. In Spain we shared danger and work and fun and bed and friends and it looked like we belonged together. But she always had to work hard, and it looked to her like I didn’t. She started to think I was superficial, especially when I started picking apart her politics. She was always for the people against the fascists, and so far so good. But she wound up in a cheering-box, and you can’t do that and stay honest. The only time I did it, I wound up excusing Stalin’s murder of Andres Nin and Pepe Robles and others, and it cost me my friendship with dos Passos. Fundamentally she and I were on different courses. It just took a while to work itself out.”

“No further questions for Miss Gellhorn, your honor.”

“Mr. Hemingway, before Miss Gellhorn even arrived in England, you had met Mary Welsh and had already decided you were going to marry her.”

“It wasn’t so much decided, as recognized. Somehow as soon as we were introduced, I knew that this person and I belonged together the way you know that dawn is going to follow nighttime.”

“And after all that happened in the following seventeen years, do you still think you and she belonged together?”

“All I know is what I told you. How can I know what our lives would have been if we had done something else?”

“Very well. When you were discharged on May 29^th, you were told not only to refrain from alcohol, but to rest quietly. Why didn’t you follow doctor’s orders?”

“Were they going to call off the invasion until I felt better? Besides, that isn’t how I handled injury. I paid for it, sure. I lived with continuous headaches all the next year, not to mention getting another concussion in the field. But it would have been silly to put myself to bed when we were any of us liable to be killed at any odd time for any reason, or for no particular reason.”

“Then perhaps we should look at your war experience in Europe.”